OCALA -- Six years ago, Mike Sizemore and his friend Edward Anderson proposed to city and county leaders that the best way to cure Ocala of its traffic ills at railroad crossings was to move the trains out of downtown.
"And we got nowhere," Sizemore remembered. "They all but showed us the door."
Of course that was long before the state government's announcement last year of a $491 million plan to divert more CSX freight traffic from Orlando to the route through Ocala -- a move expected to increase rail traffic in the city from roughly 20 trains a day to more than 30. CSX also plans to build a 1,250-acre logistics center with a truck, rail and warehousing hub in Winter Haven in anticipation of growing freight demand on its Chicago-to-Florida line. -- Ocala.com
