Joe,
I hate driving in a strange town where the streets are named after trees,
fruits, people, or whatever in no particular order.
Really. Some of the names are really bizarre...I wonder what they were smoking when they named the streets??
In Miami, the streets are numbered in direction from the intersection
of Miami Avenue and Flagler Street, in downtown. Depending on the
compass point from there, it's like Northwest 10th Street, Northeast 2nd Avenue, Southwest 8th Street (calle ocho for Little Havana, where "se
habla espa¤ol is the rule), or Southeast 21st Street. The satellite
community of Hialeah, to the northwest of Miami, uses West and East for
their streets, divided by Hialeah Drive and Palm Avenue. But, the
numbers don't match up exactly when converting the Hialeah Street
numbers to Miami Street numbers.
Miami (its nickname is "The Magic City") owes its existence to the
railroad, particularly The Florida East Coast Railroad (FEC), created by
the late Henry Morrison Flagler. The line originally went from
Jacksonville to Palm Beach, but after freezes hit much of Florida one
winter, he thought it wasn't worth going further south. Yet, in Miami,
Julia Tuttle (called "The Mother Of Miami") sent Flagler orange
blossoms, showing him that the freeze had stayed north of there. So,
Flagler extended the line to Miami.
Later, he'd extend that to Key West, but the line south of Florida
City was wiped out by the Labor Day Hurricane of 1935. Much of the old
right of way became US Highway 1, the only road from the mainland to the
Keys. Now, north of Miami, the main line turns west, and ends at an area
just west of Hialeah. It has a connecting track (or did at one time) to
a point on the southwest side of Miami International Airport to the CSX Homestead Extension. That track literally ends in some folks front
yards, according to Google Earth.
Brightline (Virgin Railways) runs passenger service right now from
Miami to Palm Beach, and there are plans to eventually build an
extension to Orlando International Airport...and maybe to Tampa and Jacksonville. The last time the FEC ran passenger service was in 1967.
One private varnish car, the Azalea, was preserved, but it requires a
power car when operating. The station used by Brightline is close to the original FEC Station. A connecting track at the "control point" named
"Iris", allows Tri-Rail Commuter Trains to operate from the FEC Depot
near downtown Miami, to the north end of that line just north of West
Palm Beach.
The original Seaboard Coast Line (SCL) depot (formed with the merger
of the Seaboard Airline (SAL) Railroad and the Atlantic Coastline (ACL) Railroad) was at Northwest 22nd Street, and Northwest 7th Avenue. Amtrak
built the current station at 8303 Northwest 37th Avenue in 1978, and the original depot was razed shortly thereafter. Like Tampa Union Station,
and the original St. Louis Union Station, Miami is a "stub end
terminal", meaning that unless there's a circle track or a Y track,
where the train can turn around, or back into the station, the train
enters the depot engine first.
Tri-Rail operates on the same track Amtrak uses from West Palm Beach southward...with its southern terminus at a point about a mile
east-northeast of Miami International Airport. You can ride a monorail
direct to the airport from the depot.
Unfortunately, like San Francisco and other areas, Miami has a large
homeless population, and the crap (literally) that goes along with it,
in the downtown areas.
Daryl
* OLX 1.53 * I drive way too fast to worry about cholesterol.
--- SBBSecho 3.10-Win32
* Origin: The Thunderbolt BBS - tbolt.synchro.net (1:19/33)