Overview of the Florida East Coast Key West Extension

In the furthest southern place where fresh water flowed in the Northern Everglades, they would load up a water train of cars every day and send it south for particular drop offs. And later in the day there'd be another train that would come back and pick up all the cars. The railroad needed a lot of water for its operations and there was no fresh water in the keys. They did a considerable amount of well drilling. They went three, four, 500 feet and never found it anywhere. And the railroad was owned by Henry Flagler and he had some luxury hotels down in the keys that required water as well. And, they sold water to local residents. I have maps showing water systems from each of the water tanks. They had it at major places. The Florida east coast and its Key West extension are facing bankruptcy as the depression spreads. But in January of 1930, the road is enjoying enough tourist and freight traffic to and from Cuba to keep red off the ledger sheets. This HO scale recreation of the FEC was built for Cal Winter by Railserves Ross and Gail Allen. The layout represents the line from Miami to Key West, with a staging yard serving as Jacksonville. This means that 33 bridges, fills and lots of water were needed to preserve the memory of the prototypes engineering marvel. Hi, I'm Janet Keller and I'm here with Cal Winter at his Florida east coast Key West extension. Alan's recuperating from a car accident and he's really going to be sorry he missed seeing this layout in person. Cal, when you hired Railserve to build the layout for you, is this what you expected you'd get? This is everything I hoped for but was afraid to dream about. It's a really special layout. The Florida East coast completely fills a 16 by 24 foot garage with two decks of coastal scenery and operation. The Jacksonville staging yard was built in an adjacent garage. This custom built layout uses flex track with a 30 inch minimum radius. We'll begin this trip on the upper deck at Key West.