Sigh.........

The book.

Another weighty tome far too involved and detailed to read.
I should know better, and guess I do. I haven’t ordered a book in years.
The book is The Florida Keys Overseas Railway by Warren Zeiller, ordered online from Signature Press.
As an old railfan I’ve always been interested in the Florida Keys Overseas Railway, another one of those incredible railroad projects, in this case to build a continuous railroad all the way to Key West.
Previously the trip to Key West involved a slew of ferry trips, mostly from key to key.
Building a railroad involves heavy construction of the infrastructure that can support a railroad, including in this case a slew of long cross-water passages.
Although the water crossed wasn’t very deep; often no more than knee-deep.
Railroad equipment can be fairly heavy, even extremely heavy. A roadbed has to be constructed that won’t sink, and trestles and/or bridges had to be built over water.
Trestles made of wood pilings deteriorate, so original trestle construction was replaced with multi-arched concrete viaducts.


Remains of the Bow Channel Viaduct north of Sugarloaf Key. (The old highway was built right on top.) (Photo by Warren Zeiller.)

It was a monstrous undertaking; more challenging than the dreamers posited.
But it was built: a continuous railroad all the way to Key West.
Some could be built on land, but a lot was on viaduct over water.
It lasted until 1935, when a powerful hurricane washed out parts of it.
Rebuilding it was beyond-the-pale, especially since the reason it was built never developed.
That was trade with Cuba.
Make no mistake, the viability of railroading is moving freight, not passengers.
Passengers are always secondary. A railroad can move passengers expeditiously (witness the commute into New York City), but the money is in freight.
The Florida Keys Overseas Railway was sort of a lightweight. I don’t think it could have supported heavy freight haulage.
Maybe the freight haulage when built, but not what developed over the next 20-30 years.


Remains of the long Moser Channel Bridge looking west from Pigeon Key. New highway is at left. (Photo by Warren Zeiller.)

Quite a bit of the overseas railroad still existed after the hurricane; e.g. the concrete viaducts and bridges.
It was sold to the Florida Highway Department, and used to construct a continuous highway to Key West.
Since then a new highway was built to Key West, and the old road abandoned.
Parts of the viaducts were broken, and old bridges removed. Remnants of the long viaducts, still quite striking, are used as fishing piers.
My wife and I traversed this new road, U.S. Route One, about 1979 in a rental Thunderbird.
Saw the southernmost-point-in-the-continental-U.S. marker pictured at left.
The new road parallels quite a bit of the old overseas railroad, what had become the previous highway.
Some of the bridges had been removed to open channels and block access.
This included arches of concrete viaducts.
The old highway was rotting.
15 years have passed since my stroke, and I’m told it compromised my ability to concentrate.
Well I guess so. Reading material gets shoved aside.
A while ago I got a book by Brock Yates on Harley-Davidson motorcycles; “Outlaw Machine.”
I managed to read the whole thing, but it went along fairly well; i.e. not muddled in detail.
Not too long ago I got another Brock Yates book on Enzo Ferrari.
It was recommended by Tim Belknap (“BELL-napp”), retired from the mighty Mezz, and a car-guy like me.
Yates’ Ferrari book pillories Ferrari as a pompous jerk; and that his road-cars weren’t very good — just cashing in on his reputation.
Well, maybe so. But I know too that Yates often makes a mountain-out-of-a-molehill to popularize an issue.
But the Harley book was great. So I got the book — a slightly used library book.
I managed to read about a third of it, but gave up. It was detailing every race the Ferrari team had ever entered.
The pillorying of Ferrari is in there somewhere, but I never got that far.
What I did read of it was in waiting-rooms when our poor dog Killian was being treated for cancer. (He didn’t survive.)
So now another unreadable tome.
I’m sure the author had great fun researching the intricate details of this vast overseas railway project.
But I can’t get interested in such minutia — at least not now.
The book will get glanced at and then filed away.

• I am a railfan, and have been since I was a child.
• My wife of 41+ years is “Linda.”
• I had a stroke October 26, 1993.
• “Brock Yates” is a western NY automotive writer and car-enthusiast who participated in the founding of Car & Driver magazine in the middle ‘60s. He has retired.
• The “mighty Mezz” is the Canandaigua Daily-Messenger newspaper, from where I retired over three years ago. Best job I ever had.
• “Killian” was a previous dog; a rescue Irish-Setter. He was dog number five — our fifth Irish-Setter. We are now on “Scarlett,” another Irish-Setter, dog number six — also a rescue dog.