The Tavares & Gulf Railroad
-
- If you have a Sound Card, you're listening to
"Ashokan's Farewell", by Jay Ungar. It was the theme for the Civil War series
produced on PBS a couple of years ago, and playing it with a fiddler friend, I couldn't
help sequencing it.
-
-
- The Tavares & Gulf Railroad was a small branch line that
ran from Winter Garden and Ocoee (pronounced aw-koy) to Tavares, Florida from the 1890's
until 1969. It was acquired by the Seaboard Air Line Railroad in 1926, but operated
separately for a number of years, even after the merger with the Atlantic Coast Line
Railroad in 1967 (which formed the Seaboard Coast Line Railroad). During the 1960's, the
T&G operated one diesel engine, an RS-3 on loan from Seaboard, and carried freight,
supplies, and product to and from the citrus groves, quarries, and manufacturing plants
that located along the line. The latter included furniture, and pre-stressed concrete.
-
- I am currently modeling a fanciful version of the T&G
from Ferndale through Astatula and Tavares to Lake Jem in H.O. Scale in a space of 15' x
5' in a waterwings design. Here is the layout itself, captured from CADRail, an excellent
railroad design program you can learn more about here.
And here's the Control Panel, created in Corel Draw. I will
have this printed onto KomaTex, and mount all switches and LED's right on the panel.
- I belong to the Atlantic
Coastline and Seaboard Air Line Historical Society, and the Orlando Historical
Railroad Modelers Society. Probably the best jump-off links for Model Railroading are Dan Dawdy's Cyberspace World Railroad,
or Tried & True Trains. Kalbach Publishing,
publishers of Model Railroader also have a web site here.
-
- If you know anyone who worked for Seaboard during the
1960's, I would love to interview that person. Please send me email if you do.
Here's a picture of the last run of the T&G from Winter
Garden to Tavares photographed at the turnout in Winter Garden in 1967.
