SUMMONING THE ECHOES.

Trains contributor Kevin P. Keefe provides today's ferroequinology.  "Brightline conjures the glory of Florida East Coast passenger trains."

Apart from the 125 mph section between the Orlando airport and the coast, the trains run on Florida East Coast metals.  That a private railroad would experiment with fast upscale passenger trains continues to surprise me, and that it was Florida East Coast might be even more surprising.

There was one railroad I figured I’d never ride, not in a million years: Florida East Coast. In those days, FEC was deep into its role as a no-frills, no-nonsense freight-only moneymaker. After surviving bankruptcy, the occasional hurricane, and most of all a brutal and epochal strike, the FEC became a harbinger for the industry. So much of what it did in those years pointed to the future: caboose-less trains, two-man crews, disciplined scheduling, and conversion of its vaunted double-track mainline into a single-track raceway bristling with CTC-controlled sidings. Passenger trains quickly became anathema.

If fact, the last true FEC passenger train ran on July 31, 1968, a three-car local. By that time, the other varnish of FEC’s storied past had moved over to longtime competitor Seaboard Coast Line’s parallel route, partly to avoid the risk of running on a strike-bound railroad. Thus was the intrastate FEC — relatively independent of ICC oversight — free to become the lean operation it was meant to be.

As Trains’ David P. Morgan put it in a memorable profile in February 1975, “There are two Florida East Coast Railways, one for the romantic and one for the realist. The old FEC appeals to the heart; the new FEC appeals to the head.” The one that appealed to the head wouldn’t be one to run excursions, making FEC’s mileage a distant dream.

That one train ran under a state regulatory order, and the timetable alerted potential passengers that the railroad was operating under strike conditions.  Years ago, though, Florida East Coast served the shore-side communities north from Palm Beach to Jacksonville, and Atlantic Coast Line ran its passenger service that way.  (Come the strike, those trains switched to Seaboard.  At the time, the Coast Line and Seaboard were in merger talks, and the remaining Florida trains after the merger likely would have gone that way.)

But most of our ride — about 200 miles out of a total of 235 — was on the FEC (I also got in a West Palm-Miami round trip the morning after the conference). I’m inclined to see just about every train trip I take through the lens of history, in this case contrasting Brightline with the once-upon-a-time FEC, jewel of the Flagler System, host of the Florida Special (“The Aristocrat of Winter Trains”), owner of that boondoggle known as the Key West extension (destroyed in the 1935 hurricane), and generally credited with making possible the conversion of coastal Florida from a malarial swamp into a glittering civilization.

Is FEC founder Henry Flagler’s place in Florida history overstated? Not if you ask Lucius Beebe. “(Flagler) was able before his death to claim Florida almost in its geographical, economic, and social entirety as his own creation,” wrote the author, never one to understate. “Call it enterprise or call it megalomania, no Roman proconsul or magnifico of medieval Italy ever brought into being so grandiose a concept as railroading and its incidental and collateral expansion in Flagler’s Florida.” Classic Beebe.

Brightline inherits a rarefied tradition. In the decades before the advent of 1963 austerity, the Florida East Coast was one of America’s premier hosts of passenger trains, most of them the result of partner railroads that funneled sun-bound varnish through Jacksonville. The aptly named Dixie Flagler got to the FEC via Chicago & Eastern Illinois, Louisville & Nashville, and Atlantic Coast Line. The Southern got in the act with the Royal Palm. The Pennsylvania, Louisville & Nashville, and ACL combined on the South Wind. Illinois Central sent its Seminole and Miamian, Palmetto, Havana Special, and various Champions.

Because those trains catered to Pullman passengers, many of them transited Florida in darkness, combining sections northbound or splitting southbound at Jacksonville.

It was a dizzying lineup. You’d be hard pressed to say that witnessing a succession of New York Central trains split the night in Sandusky or Pennsy trains do the same at Altoona was any more exciting than what you’d see every day along the FEC at St. Augustine or Fort Pierce.

Morgan found it romantic. “Train watchers recall the Flagler System as a nocturnal railroad,” he wrote. “Trains seldom disturbed the heat rising above its 112-pound rails or actuated its color block signals during the day; night was when graceful 4-8-2s parted the balmy breezes as the engines stroked through the moonlight with Havana Specials and citrus blocks.”

Brightline isn’t the old FEC by a long shot. Nothing can replace the gleaming silver streamliners and red-and-yellow E units of the postwar era. But judged on its own terms, Brightline is equally exciting, especially when you gaze out the window at 110 mph and watch palm trees, sparkling ocean inlets, and sun-bleached resorts go past in a blur, a view as old as Flagler’s original vision. Brightline is a worthy successor to “The Seagoing Railroad” — one I was especially pleased to add to my Rand McNally atlas.

Once upon a time, that Havana Special connected with passenger steamers at Key West for passengers enroute to ... Havana.

These days, there is, for the time being, a sleeping car available between Chicago and Miami, on an Amtrak train that runs by way of Washington, D. C., and serves both coasts by doubling back from Tampa toward Lakeland before continuing to West Palm and Miami.