I first saw the lithograph above some 45 years ago at the state museum in Cedar Key, Florida. I thought it would be neat to model. I did not have the skills to do so then, and for many years did not find time to work on it. Now that I am retired and have a little experience building models, I am finally going to tackle it.
The railroad came to Cedar Key in 1861. The Florida Railroad ran from Fernandina on the east coast of Florida to Cedar Key, which is on the west coast a few miles south of the mouth of the Suwannee River. The primary motivation for building the railroad was to provide a shortcut for goods shipped between ports on the east coast and gulf coast of the United States. Transferring goods from ships to trains at one port and back to ships at the other eliminated the long and dangerous voyage around the southern end of Florida, where ships wrecked at the rate of once a week in the middle of the 19th century.
The first train reached Cedar Key in March, 1861, just months before the beginning of the Civil War. The Florida Railroad was badly damaged during the war, including destruction of the facilities at Cedar Key, but was rebuilt after the war. The expansion of the railroad network throughout the United States, and in particular to Tampa in the latter part of the 19th century, drew rail and ship traffic away from Cedar Key. The construction of lighthouses along the Florida Keys and the replacement of sail power with steam also meant that shipping around the tip of Florida became much safer, removing the original motive for the use of Cedar Key as a rail port. The railroad to Cedar Key was abandoned in 1932.
The lithograph above shows the Cedar Key Terminal as it was in 1884, near the peak period of activity there. The terminal is very simple, with the main line ending in a stub on a trestle extending from the end of the dock, with one siding on the dock and a short siding on Way Key. The entire dock complex could be modeled in N scale in less than six feet. I want a section that I can take to train shows, but that can be attached to another section for a somewhat larger layout. I also want to be able to run trains on the portable section for display at shows, even if just in a loop. That constrains me to modeling in N scale on a section 5 feet by 3 feet, selectively compressing elements of the dock complex, and adding a return line to Way Key from the stub end of the track on the dock. I will be recording the construction of the models in coming posts to this blog.