In the Fifties, passenger travel picked up until a union strike by railroad workers brought FEC Railway passenger service to a halt in 1963. Nationwide, strikers demanded a ten-cent-per-hour pay increase -- immediately. Here in Florida Ball countered by offering twelve cents per hour, to be paid incrementally over a year. The workers refused, and after three years of unsuccessful negotiations, Ball decided to cut his losses and disband passenger service altogether. Rather than pay workers more money to maintain a mediocre profit on passenger travel, Ball opted to reinvest in heavier rail to upgrade the freight business. And while the national strike lingered until 1974, the airlines surpassed the railroads as the most popular means of travel.
Just as the 1960s marked a fundamental change for the FEC, so too did South Florida undergo a tremendous transformation during the decade. The Latinization of the area begun by an exodus of Cubans from Castro's regime reinvigorated the FEC Railway in unexpected ways. "We became a hub for Latin America and we encouraged these Latins to get into the import-export business," Barreto explains. "We started an industrial park west of the airport called Commerce Park, and we encouraged those guys [importers-exporters], tried to help them out, sold them land. They handled the paperwork and we would handle the bulk. The bottom line in our end was handling export, which was growing. They went out there touching base, communicating with people in South America."
From the late Sixties to the present, under the direction of William Thornton, the FEC has steadily moved into the real estate business. Barreto: "Somewhere along the line our directors, knowing that our property could be used better than just keeping it as railroad property, determined that we should form a new company called Gran Central Corporation. So we got the profits from the railroad and put it into building industrial parks, developing industrial land."
Barreto waves a hand toward his office window to indicate the office park outside: "When I bought this land, it was for the railroad, then it was transferred over to Gran Central. All these buildings you see, three million square feet, all highly landscaped, streets very nice and very clean A this is the modern part of the railway."
Indeed, Barreto's successor, Ray Jones, doubles as vice president of the FEC Railway and the Gran Central Corp., dividing his workload but spending most of his time managing Gran Central's leases and property. Middle-aged and with no children, Jones is all business. And while business is good, he says he's concerned about the company's future. This past February the St. Joe Paper Company, which now owns 54.5 percent of FEC Industries' stock (the remainder is publicly held), announced its intention to sell its controlling interest. "St. Joe is definitely in flux right now," Jones says. The two principal companies that seem most interested in buying out St. Joe are Norfolk Southern Railway and CSX Transportation. (CSX owns the other other major railway line in Miami, which serves both freight trains and the passenger trains of Amtrak and Tri-Rail.)
The FEC Railway owns approximately 12,000 acres of land along Florida's east coast devoted to railroad operations between Jacksonville and Miami. Gran Central owns and manages approximately 19,146 acres throughout the state, including nearly 1700 acres in Dade County and 60 in Broward. Together FEC and Gran Central employ nearly 1100 people. The asking price for both companies, according to Jones, is $800 million.
The latest in the Flagler line of promoters and developers, Jones characterizes the modern FEC Railway with a salesman's zeal. "I think as long as Miami continues to be the gateway to the Americas that that's going to continue to increase our business," he says. "More and more large steamship lines are calling at Port Everglades and the Port of Miami and dropping containers, picking up containers. That increases our business. The railroad is a viable entity and an important entity as far as the development of Florida is concerned. That can't be downplayed. Because without a railroad, without a transportation arm, it's just like being in the middle of nowhere. If you can't get product there, if you can't get freight there, the area's going to die.
