Ocala Northern Railroad
| Locale | northeastern Florida |
|---|---|
| Dates of operation | 1914–1922 |
| Track gauge | 4 ft 8 1⁄2 in (1,435 mm) standard gauge |
The Ocklawaha Valley Railroad, originally the Ocala Northern Railroad, was a railroad running from Silver Springs Junction, Florida (east of Ocala, Florida) to Palatka, Florida, running roughly parallel to the Oklawaha River. Except for the southernmost part, from Silver Springs Junction to Silver Springs, which was leased from the Seaboard Air Line Railroad (with trackage rights on the SAL main line to Ocala), the railroad never had any corporate relationship with larger railroad companies.
The Ocala Northern Railroad, a new railroad company, leased the 1.9-mile (3.1 km) Seaboard Air Line Railroad spur to Silver Springs on December 14, 1909, and obtained trackage rights over four miles (6 km) of the Seaboard Air Line Railroad to downtown Ocala. The ONRR was owned by E. P. Rentz, who owned a saw mill at Silver Springs. He soon built his railroad north to Fort McCoy and built a series of logging railroads into the forest. He continued to build the ONRR, and it reached Palatka, Florida by 1912, with 45.5 miles (73.2 km) of track stretching from Silver Springs to Palatka.
According to E. P. Rentz quoted in the Palatka Daily News there were dreams of a great diagonal railroad running from Jacksonville to Tampa via Ocala. Rentz may have had in mind an associations with the Ocala Southwestern Railroad, which ran about 6 miles southwest of Ocala in the direction of Tampa; no but nothing more ever came of it. Plans to extend the railroad across the St. Johns River to Hastings and then north on the east shore to Jacksonville fell through; the company went bankrupt in May 1913.
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