Valrico Subdivision

Seaboard Air Line passenger depot in Mulberry. The depot is now the Mulberry Phosphate Museum.

The Seaboard Air Line Railroad built the segment of the line from Welcome Junction to Nichols around 1905. It was built as an extension of the Plant City, Arcadia, and Gulf Railroad (which is today the Plant City Subdivision), which Seaboard had bought earlier that year. Seaboard extended the line east to Mulberry and Bartow in 1912.

Crossing of the Valrico and Bone Valley Subdivisions in Mulberry. Diamond is located in the median of State Road 37.

The line crossed the Atlantic Coast Line Railroad's Bone Valley Branch (now the Bone Valley Subdivision) in Mulberry. The junction of these two lines is today located in the median of State Road 37 and the lines are connected through Mulberry Yard. The line also connected to the Charlotte Harbor and Northern Railway (now the Achan Subdivision) in Mulberry which at the time went as far as Port Boca Grande where a vast majority of phosphate was shipped in the early 20th century.

By 1916, Seaboard would extend the line east from Bartow to Lake Wales, Alcoma, Hesperides, and Walinwa. At Walinwa, the line connected to the Kissimmee River Railway which continued east to Nalaca where it served a turpentine mill. Track from just east of Bartow (at a point known historically as Pembroke Junction) south to Homeland was part of a Seaboard spur built in 1914 to the now-defunct Coronet Pembroke Mine. Track east of Bartow to Lake Wales was abandoned in the early 1980s (the junction where the Plant City Subdivision meets the CSX S Line in Plant City is still known today as Lake Wales Junction because of this extension).

Seaboard built the Valrico Cutoff in 1925 which connected the Seaboard main line (CSX's S Line) at Valrico with the track at Welcome Junction. This is today is the westernmost trackage of the line and it was built to shorten the distance from Mulberry to Tampa. Seaboard designated the line as the Valrico Subdivision.[3] The Valrico Cutoff also crossed Seaboard's Sarasota Subdivision at Durant which also shortened the distance from Tampa to Sarasota.

The Valrico Subdivision would also become an important route for Seaboard's passenger trains as it provided a direct route from Tampa to Miami (which was accessed through the Seaboard's Miami Subdivision in Lake Wales, which was also completed in the 1920s). Seaboard would operate the Cross Florida Limited over the line, which was one of the first rail services to connect Tampa and Miami directly. The Cross Florida Limited would also have passenger stops in Mulberry and Bartow.[3] The Mulberry depot still stands and is now a phosphate museum.[6]

CSX train passing the historic Fort Meade Depot (milepost AX 875.13) on the Valrico Subdivision.

The oldest trackage of the current Varico Subdivision is its south-easternmost trackage from Homeland (just south of Bartow) to Fort Meade and Bowling Green. This segment was built in 1886 by the Florida Southern Railway as their Charlotte Harbor Division (which later became the Atlantic Coast Line Railroad's Lakeland–Fort Myers Line).[7] Today, this segment of the Valrico Subdivision ends less than a mile south of the Polk/Hardee County line in Bowling Green (just south of the South Fort Meade Mine). The line was abandoned north of Homeland and south of Bowling Green in the late 1980s. The Atlantic Coast Line's former passenger depot in Fort Meade still stands along the line, and the Bowling Green depot stands about a hundred yards south of the end of the track.

The Atlantic Coast Line and Seaboard Air Line Railroads merged in 1967 to form the Seaboard Coast Line Railroad, which brought all of the track under a single owner. In the Seaboard Coast Line era, the Valrico Subdivision designation continued to cover the line from Valrico east through Bartow and West Lake Wales, which was still in service at the time. Track east of West Lake Wales was redesignated as the Lake Wales Subdivision. Track was removed between Bartow and West Lake Wales by 1982.[8] Remaining track east of West Lake Wales is now operated by the Florida Midland Railroad.

The track from Homeland to Bowling Green (which still ran from Lakeland to Fort Myers in the years after the merger) was part of the Fort Myers Subdivision.[9] When the Fort Myers Subdivision was abandoned north of Homeland and south of Bowling Green in the late 1980s, the remaining track was annexed to the Valrico Subdivision (CSX's CH Spur and the Seminole Gulf Railway south of Arcadia are discontinuous segments of this line).

In 1980, the Seaboard Coast Line's parent company merged with the Chessie System, creating the CSX Corporation. The CSX Corporation initially operated the Chessie and Seaboard Systems separately until 1986, when they were merged into CSX Transportation.