The crowd that gathered last night on the sixth floor of the Broward Main Library for the presentation on "The Great Days of Rail Travel on the Florida East Coast" definitely represented the past, though one of the presenters was the CEO of All Aboard Florida, the passenger service that is scheduled to start running - at the end of 2015 - trains every hour between downtown Miami and Orlando International Airport.
I sat next to a man from Davie who told me he had been the Latin American editor for the Miami Herald. He told of flying in a plane with the president of Bolivia who, a few months later, died in a plane crash in the same mountains they had flown over. He introduced me to his wife, whom he had met at college in South Dakota.
"George McGovern was her debate instructor," he said. "And he was my academic adviser."
