The Trains Came Back: SunRail and Pine Castle
Passenger trains bypassed Pine Castle for decades after the depot era ended. In 2014, SunRail's Sand Lake Road station — at the community's northern edge — put Pine Castle back on the railroad its town was built on.
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Pine Castle was a railroad town before it was anything else: the South Florida Railroad’s mainline served it from just before 1882, and the depot was its first centre. The twentieth century took the trains away in stages — successor railroads’ passenger services bypassed the local stop, and Amtrak’s trains ran through without calling. What the twenty-first century did, in 2014, was bring them back.
Sand Lake Road station
SunRail, the region’s commuter railroad, opened its Sand Lake Road station in 2014 on the same historic rail corridor, at Pine Castle’s northern edge — the station this hub carries as its photograph, labelled as the edge it sits on. For Pine Castle residents it restored the arrangement the town was founded on: a train, on the old line, north to downtown Orlando’s stations or south toward Kissimmee and Poinciana, with the airport a short hop from the platform.
The full circle
There is a satisfying symmetry the community is entitled to enjoy. The railroad created Pine Castle in the 1880s; the airfield named for it remade Orlando in the 1940s; and in 2014 the railroad came back to collect its town. Few suburbs can draw their whole history as one line on a map. Pine Castle’s line has trains on it again.
Photo: SunRail’s Sand Lake Road station, at Pine Castle’s northern edge. Photo: James Roberts, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
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