Commuter Rail is 20 years before its time

[thelakelander]

I just came across this 1996 TU article.  Considering this article is nearly 15 years old, we better get moving.  Five years will be here before you know it.

`New' rail idea is really quite old
The Florida Times-Union - Sunday, November 3, 1996
Author: Bill Foley, Times-Union columnist

Commuter rail for Jacksonville, while a nifty idea, is 20 years or so before its time, Mayor John Delaney opined recently. A generation away at best.

Delaney's comment came among talk of using light rail to remedy Jacksonville's exponentially increasing traffic woes.

It's an idea whose time may be just 'round the bend. But it also is an idea more than 100 years old.

Actually, in 20 years we'll approach the centennial of suburban commuter rail as political PROMISE.

A prototypical trolley to the Beaches was a core argument for the original St. Johns River bridge in 1917.

"As sure as night follows day, just as surely will trolley cars run from Jacksonville to the Beach if the people own the way for them to cross to river," bridge backers promised.

"The Witching Waves Await You," teased the good citizens of the shore communities, beckoning Jacksonville to shuttle townies to its Little Coney Island.

A self-styled "Little Band of Patriots" boosted the bridge for a number of reasons, the trolley far from the least. (The auto hardly was the universal mode of transportation in 1917.)

Thirty-nine citizens were officers of the St. Johns River Bridge Association, and bridge opponents said 32 of them owned property on the yonder side of the proposed span. Their property was in a hinterland that was to be traversed by traction as well as by tire.

Opponents charged the bridge would be but a wedge into a morass of speculation, development and demands on the public purse in the wasteland beyond the St. Johns. The prescient perhaps perceived Regency Square, dead ahead. People could already cross the river on the ferry, although, for sure, a trolley couldn't.

"Don't be fooled. You pay the freight," said the Anti- Bridge Bond Association.

But on July 10, 1917, Duval County voters voted by a majority of 819 votes to bridge the river. The bridge was bound by law to have a trolley track. It was part of the legislative act setting the referendum.

The St. Johns River Bridge -- later the Acosta -- would connect the city to the Beaches road opened but seven years before. Two rail lines had connected the city and the shore independently of the highway, but a trolley they were not.

In the excitement of ensuing years the Beaches trolley idea was shunted aside. A world war, a Jazz Age, a Boom and a Bust, Prohibition, Depression and a Katzenjammer relationship between the city and transit companies intervened between thought and deed.

A trolley eventually connected Jacksonville and South Jacksonville over the bridge , but it was but a truncated loop of the city system. A new rail spur and ferry effectively co-opted talk of the trolley

A massive " Duval County Day" celebration greeted the new ferry connection in the spring of 1926. Cut two miles off the route to the Beaches and it was to be the magic link 'twixt city and shore -- "commuter rail," if you will.

"Commuter rail" is a rather hybrid term. It can mean electric cars, elevated rail, subways and outright trains. So it has been in Jacksonville since the days of the Horse Railroad of 1875. (Mules, really, but horse sounds better.) We've even tinkered with the subway idea.

Henry Plant started the Street Railway Co. in 1880; one of its first routes was to the fair grounds, out where Jacksonville Municipal Stadium is today. Mule-pulled cars ran every half-hour.

G.A. Backenstoe ran a line north of the city to dance hall, skating rink and restaurant in the 1880s; developers built Springfield around it. Tracks soon opened through the red light district, running from City Hall through LaVilla to Burch's Brickyard. An Ortega line opened after the Ortega River was bridged -- the exact parallel used by backers of the St. Johns River bridge . Boston's Stone and Webster Co. arrived in 1902 and operated trolleys as the oft-reviled Jacksonville Traction Co.

By the mid-1920s, the Little Band of Patriots had foresworn the clamor for a trolley to the shore, but developers kept the idea alive.

The ill-fated Florida Beach real estate venture proposed light rail from the city. Others promised a luxury seaside hotel and amusement park if a trolley were built, but the closest history ever got to it was Dodge-em cars on the Boardwalk.

[CS Foltz]

I would bet money..................JTA is using those principals from that era! Heck, half of them were probably interns back then!