The Jupiter and Lake Worth Railway was a 7.5 miles (12.1 km) connection between the Jacksonville, Tampa and Key West Railway system. It connected Lake Worth at Juno, Florida to Jupiter Inlet at Jupiter, Florida. With intermediate stops at Venus and Mars, the railroad was often called the Celestial Railroad.
The purpose of the railroad was to link the Lake Worth and Jupiter Inlet. Both of which had Plant System steamboat lines. The Indian River Steamboat Company went north through the Jupiter Inlet and connected waterways (now part of the Intracoastal Waterway) to Titusville.
There were no turning tracks, so the locomotives always pointed towards Juno, forcing trains making the return trip to go in reverse. Fare was rather high for the time, being 10 cents per mile (75 cents total).
Henry Flagler, the owner of the Florida East Coast Railway, rejected the high price, instead building his own line to the west. The new railroad was finished in February 1894, and the Jupiter and Lake Worth Railway was gone by June 1896.
Eventually, a canal was dug between the two waterways that the railroad connected; this is now part of the Intracoastal Waterway.
Part of the right-of-way was used for the current alignment of U.S. 1 (SR 5), built in 1956; the rest was abandoned and has been mostly redeveloped.
Famous quotes containing the words jupiter, lake, worth and/or railway:
“If Jupiter should hurl a bolt whenever men sin,
His armory would quickly be empty.”
—Ovid (Publius Ovidius Naso)
“A lake is the landscape’s most beautiful and expressive feature. It is earth’s eye; looking into which the beholder measures the depth of his own nature. The fluviatile trees next the shore are the slender eyelashes which fringe it, and the wooded hills and cliffs around are its overhanging brows.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“It is easier to sail many thousand miles through cold and storm and cannibals, in a government ship, with five hundred men and boys to assist one, than it is to explore the private sea, the Atlantic and Pacific Ocean of one’s being alone.... It is not worth the while to go round the world to count the cats in Zanzibar.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Her personality had an architectonic quality; I think of her when I see some of the great London railway termini, especially St. Pancras, with its soot and turrets, and she overshadowed her own daughters, whom she did not understand—my mother, who liked things to be nice; my dotty aunt. But my mother had not the strength to put even some physical distance between them, let alone keep the old monster at emotional arm’s length.”
—Angela Carter (1940–1992)