Remember that Old Station
by Pete Diebel, President & CEO, Zipline Green, Inc.
As the inventor of a solar powered train, you better believe that I am a proponent of commuter rail projects. And, as the President and CEO of Zipline Green, I am well acquainted with change. Our company’s products and services offer change in the form of transportation and energy infrastructure which drives economic development. We are change. Change for the future of your community.
Still, change can sometimes be sad.
Today, as I got off the SunRail train, I noticed some construction work going on at the old Winter Park, FL Amtrak Station. As I got closer to my car I realized it wasn't construction at all: today they are demolishing the historic Winter Park Train Station. There were no protests from the city’s often loud historical preservation organizations. Just a few citizens, like me, taking a snapshot with their smartphones.
On a personal level, as I stood there watching the station get demolished, I remembered back to my childhood trips on the train to Washington DC with my parents and later to Williamsburg, VA with my elementary school. I have picked up friends from that station, and used it to ride Amtrak to South Florida as a teenager. That station has stood on the edge of our Central Park for generations of us, slipping a nickel on the tracks when the Stationmaster wasn't looking, or cutting down the tracks when walking to and from the annual art festival, or even for a rest room break for my young son as he learned bladder management skills.
From the community perspective though, today we lost a reminder of our community’s grimmer past. A reminder that we weren't always such a friendly town.
When you walked into the Winter Park train station and looked up, you might have noticed that there was a beam, reaching about six inches down from the ceiling that seemed to separate the room into not so even parts. For those in my generation and later, this appears to be simply a funny looking bit of architecture. But for my mother’s generation, this was a remnant of the “Separate but Equal” policies that once ruled the South.
The beam is all that was left of the wall that once divided the Winter Park train station into separate domains for the whites and the non-whites. My mother shared this information with me on a train trip we took with two of my nephews to Winter Haven, FL, whose station had a similar beam.
Perhaps it is time for this reminder to be torn down. Perhaps now it’s OK for the knowledge to simply reside in our hearts and minds rather than in stark physical evidence right there in our train station. The SunRail is here now and it’s time to climb on board and move on to our community’s next memories. Hopefully one that is more inclusive of everyone.
Still, I will remember that Old Station in my memories with a smile as I step on-board the SunRail.
Zipline Green’s Oasis Smart Guideway™ brings together transportation, energy, and resource management to help communities step on-board their community’s future. (cc) The Winter Park Station by Zipline Green, Inc. is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Goodbye to the Old Station
