Bridges Through History On Local Rails

By Asa Newby
        It is perhaps fitting that my reappearance on these pages would feature trains or railroads in some form; it's nice to know I haven't changed! There are still adventures to be had, though, so I'm still here to share them.
        On a quiet avenue next to Lake Eustis, the rusty pair of rails that run along the shore recently served as entertainment for us boys in a moment of distraction. Walking along the wooden ties and smelling the sticky creosote, we came upon a very rare sight indeed; a wooden bridge that carried the tracks over a sleepy canal. This canal runs to Trout Lake, and while we had driven over it thousands of times in a car, this was our first crossing on this out-of-the-way railroad trestle. Naturally, this discovery excited our inner Train Fan, and we happily walked back and forth across its sturdy timbers for many minutes.
        Now you may be wondering, “Why would you care about some bridge?” True, it doesn’t move, make any interesting sounds, and many people would not consider it to be pretty. But it is special, for several reasons that lend it that aura of old Florida magic, which is disappearing from our fair state with every bulldozed orange grove and newly-completed housing development and Race-Trac gas station. That old Florida deserves to be remembered, so let’s jump in.
        In the early 20th Century, central Florida was fast becoming an agricultural hub for the southeast as well as the whole United States. The Atlantic Coast Line Railroad wanted to move Lake County’s produce to markets across the country, and so they built a “branch line” from Sanford to Umatilla by way of Sorrento, Mount Dora, Tavares, and Eustis. To reach Umatilla, the “Coast Line” built several wooden trestles and bridges to cross creeks, rivers and roads, and the little trestle in Eustis is one of these original installations, now over one hundred years old and still serving its purpose.
        The railroad would haul citrus, watermelons and anything else Umatilla could fit on a freight car until the 1980s, when after several changes in ownership, the line from Eustis was deactivated, only maintained for car storage purposes. The tracks from Sanford through Tavares received the same treatment, and eventually all rails east of downtown Mount Dora were completely abandoned, long since earmarked to become a hiking and biking trail.
        But the bridges are still there, standing proudly on their creosote-soaked pillars, spikes still gripping the rails more than a lifetime after the last passenger trains jogged across their beams, more than a generation after the last carload of freight rumbled over their wooden ties. The tracks that run through Lake County are unique to the state, having been built as a quiet branch line for our communities rather than a headline-grabbing speedway for the glitzy streamliners back in the “good old days.” It is that intentional anonymity that has saved the rusty rails from a date with the scrapper’s torch; that little trestle next to Lake Eustis is perhaps the last of its kind in the entire state.
        But for how much longer? The answer might be “not much.”
        With the development of the hiking trail along the State Road 44 building project, talks have begun in the city of Mount Dora about purchasing the now-dormant railroad right-of-way to Tavares and ripping it up in order to extend the trail. Possible future plans also include an eventual connection to Umatilla and the (theoretical) trail that will be built there. Nothing is written in stone as of yet, but if these developments were to proceed, it could easily mark the end of the line for three historical pieces of Florida history which have managed to survive in the world of the highway and jumbo jet.
        There is a petition underway to stop these events from unfolding, however; you can go online to www.change.org, where a petition to bring a tourist railroad back to Mount Dora and greatly reduce costs to the planned trail had recently gained nearly 1,000 signatures in just over one week. Many will remember the various tourist trains that used to run along Lake Dora, from the diminutive “Herbie Express” to the beautiful “Orange Blossom Cannonball” steam locomotive to most recently, the “Royal Palm Experience” which fell victim to the Covid shutdown. A railroad such as this would not only bring hundreds of thousands of visitors—and the money they would spend—to our communities, but would also save the century-old bridges and railroad that helped build those communities back before internet, asphalt roads and affordable internal combustion.
        True, they're just bridges. But many of us have clickety-clacked across them, and others have boated beneath them. Some of us have fished off of them, and thousands more have consumed commodities delivered on the rails that traversed them. They're not flashy, eye-catching or even easy to find, but they still smell like creosote, and the fleeting magic of Old Florida still lives in their sturdy timbers. They are just bridges, but if you sit quietly by Lake Eustis and listen to the water gurgle beneath you as the Redwing Blackbirds call in the weeds, you might—like us—find them to be something truly special as they stand amidst the Spanish Moss and Cypress.