Trains in Florida

Les Standiford, Last Train to Paradise: Henry Flagler and the Spectacular Rise and Fall of the Railroad that Crossed an Ocean (New York: Three Rivers Press, 2002).

What could be a better combination for a good read than a visionary, a seemingly impossible obstacle, trains, a hurricane and Papa Hemingway? Last Train to Paradise tells the story of Henry Flagler’s obsession to extend his Florida East Coast Railroad to Key West. Building the line across the Florida marsh and Keys, including a seven mile expanse of ocean, seemed impossible, but in 1912, after seven years of work, the line was completed. Flagler who developed much of Florida’s East Coast, had reached his goal. He hoped the opening of the Panama Canal and travel to Havana (it was a short steamship ride away) would provide a boom to this railroad. In this regard, he failed. The railroad never turned a profit. Ironically, considering that Flagler was a teetotaler, the one commodity the line attracted was bootlegged liquor. But this was after Flagler’s death, during the era of Prohibition within the United States. Bootleggers brought liquor into Key West from Cuba, and then shipped it up the east coast. Flagler’s railroad was destroyed in 1935, during one of the worst hurricanes ever to strike the Keys. The heroic effort by railroad employees to save residents of the Keys is retold. After the storm, so much of the railroad was damaged they never rebuilt it. The destroyed trestles were rebuilt for automobiles. One of the first observers to the hurricane’s destruction in the Middle Keys was Ernest Hemingway, who at the time was residing in Key West.