Jax Term 1970 

I digitized this 8mm film. It's a compilation I made years ago, splicing together 8mm film I had shot at the Jacksonville Terminal from late 1969 to the end of 1970. Mel Hazen, Lloyd Bragoz, and I were members of the Gateway Model Railroad Club, which then met upstairs at the Bay Street end of the Jacksonville Terminal on Friday nights. We would go down to the platform to watch the Silver Star come in. We were friends with Wayne Bellamy, an SCL agent, who tolerated us and more or less let us out on the platforms to take pictures or just trainwatch. (Wayne went with Amtrak and retired as a supervisor; he passed away in 2006.)
All of us took trips from the Terminal, of course. Everything was Seaboard Coast Line by then, but SCL still ran a fair number of trains at that late date.
These are home movies, basically, shot with a wind-up 8mm movie camera using rolls of film. I am responsible for shakiness, bad focus, bad lighting, and so on. I have slowed the film down: The digitizing runs it at 20 frames per second, a speed-up from the 16 frames my camera used - also depending on how tight the spring was, I think! Slowing down brings the speed closer to reality, and makes seeing what's there a bit easier. I've done little captioning to identify things. If you see something of note, feel free to comment below.
So, re-live the wonderful days when the Terminal still handled the Champion, Silver Meteor, Silver Star, Gulf Wind, Gulf Coast Special, Everglades, and the City of Miami and South Wind on alternating days, and a time when these trains were switched here in Jacksonville to change engines, add or remove cars and shuffle them about between trains.