WINTER PARK, Fla. – As SunRail celebrates its one-year anniversary, few are aware that Central Florida's commuter rail history goes back much further.
[WEB EXTRA: Professor Jack Lane talks about history of commuter rail]
Stored away in files, deep in the Rollins College historical archives, are photos, newspaper clippings and a few other souvenirs that tell the story of the Orlando and Winter Park Railway.
Rollins College historian professor, Jack Lane, spent a recent morning pouring over a stack of these photos, seeing some for the first time.
"Rollins has some of the most interesting archives in the state," he says. "I turn up things in these archives you wouldn't believe."
The sepia toned images offer a glimpse of Winter Park that is hard to imagine today. A time when Rollins was little more than a few wooden buildings sitting atop a sandy terrain.
On January 2, 1889, a passenger train opened for its first public run from Orlando to Winter Park. Early investor J.H. Abbott nicknamed the line the "Scenic Road," but that distinction didn't last long.
The train was originally designed to carry northern tourists to the new Seminole Hotel just completed on the shores of Lake Osceola as well as students attending classes at Rollins.
"It was a modern idea to build a line that was simply a commuter line," Lane says as he shuffles photographs between his fingers. "So in a way this was an idea, that if it had caught on would have been wonderful."
Most of what we know about the line comes from student accounts from the time. Students that are describing it rarely ever describe it in any kind of fortunate terms, it seemed to be extremely uncomfortable.
Students began calling the railroad the "Dinky Line."
"Dinky, it was dinky in every sense of the word dinky. It was small, it was unreliable, it was a joke," Lane said.
The tracks were extended into Oviedo in 1890. It's unclear when the train stopped carrying passengers but it did stay in service until 1967, transporting citrus through the Rollins College campus.
Lane still remembers the locomotive interrupting his history classes. "It was the loudest thing in the world, so class had to stop, we just stopped, twiddled our thumbs till this thing, you know going very slowly through with about three cars on it, and then it would pass," Lane said. "It was a real annoyance to the college."
The school eventually gained the right of way back. If you look closely there are still reminders around town. The Dinky Dock Park commemorates the location of the depot on campus and a bike path in the Mills/Virginia area of Orlando bears the "Dinky Line" name.
Special Thanks to the Department of College Archives and Special Collections, Rollins College and The Winter Park History Museum. Additional background provided by the article, "When Seaboard ran Trains" by Ken Murdock.