In April 1991, two friends with a shared obsession for model railroading decided to do something about it. John Beard ran a hobby shop called Brian's Boxcar. Both he and his friend Warren Jamison were tired of driving to Lakeland, Manatee County, or Miami every time they wanted to ride a live steam train, so they laid their own track closer to home, on a vacant lot that used to be the Pinellas County Fairgrounds. By that July, the final rail was down and the club had a name: Florida Live Steamers. There was no park yet. There wasn't even a plan for one.
Four years later, the city broke ground on what would become Largo Central Park, and the railroad had to pull up every inch of track it had laid and set it aside while construction happened around it. When the park opened in 1995, the city didn't clear the hobbyists out and start fresh. It wanted the railroad to stay, so the club relaid its track inside the new park and kept running. That decision, made almost as an afterthought, is why the thing most people think of as "the train ride at the park" is actually the reason the park's layout looks the way it does. The trains came first. This July, the group marked 35 years of running them.
If you already live here, that detail changes how you should read the rest of the park's calendar. It isn't run like a city amenity with a marketing department behind it. It runs on the rhythm of the volunteers who show up.
The Club Never Stopped Being A Club
Largo Central Railroad is still entirely volunteer-run, still funded by donations, and still governed by a board that includes members as young as 21. Santino Jones, who holds that title, says he signed up after seeing a news story about the railroad and taking one ride around the loop. Benjamin Barbaro, 16, sits on the club's newer Junior Board, created specifically so the institution doesn't age out with its founders. That succession planning matters, because nobody on staff at City Hall is running these trains. The people who built the track in 1991 are training the people who could still be running it decades from now.
One longtime volunteer, Kevin Cabrera, put it simply when asked what it's like watching a kid ride for the first time: "It's priceless; there are really no words to describe it."
By the railroad's 25th anniversary, ridership had grown from about 500 people on its opening weekend inside the new park to routinely more than 4,000 riders in a single weekend, with roughly 50,000 riders a year across a club of about 100 members running nine locomotives that cost an average of $18,000 apiece, on 1.5 miles of track. Those exact figures are a decade old now, but this July's coverage of the 35th anniversary described the same volunteer culture still growing, not shrinking. That's unusual for an all-volunteer nonprofit operation running on donations alone.
The Feed Store Tells The Same Story
The pattern shows up again a short walk from the train depot. The Historic Largo Feed Store, a beautifully restored early-1900s building, sits on the same property as the newer Central Park Performing Arts Center rather than having been cleared to make room for it. It's kept in rotation as a small event space, and it's booked for a community event on September 5. The Performing Arts Center leans the same direction: its main stage, the Tonne Playhouse, is described as recently and fully renovated, and it still runs a rotating Thursday night show lineup, including Jonathan Elgert's "Shake, Rattle & Roll" on August 20.
Largo's civic instinct, at least around this park, has consistently been to keep what was already working and build the new pieces around it. A shopping center with a leasing office doesn't operate that way. A volunteer railroad and a century-old feed store do.
Why The Calendar Looks Scattered Instead Of Slick
That volunteer-paced structure is also why the park's events don't line up into a tidy weekly schedule the way a commercial district's programming might. They land on recurring, specific dates set by whoever is available to run them.
| When | What | Where |
|---|---|---|
| First full weekend of every month | Largo Central Railroad rides, 10 a.m.–4 p.m. Saturday, 10 a.m.–1 p.m. Sunday | Largo Central Railroad, 101 Central Park Drive |
| Fourth Saturday of every month | Downtown Largo Evening Market | Ulmer Park |
| Thursday nights, rotating | Live show at the Tonne Playhouse (next up: Jonathan Elgert, Aug. 20) | Central Park Performing Arts Center |
| Aug. 21, 6 p.m. | Live music on the breezeway | Largo Golf Course |
| Sept. 5 | Community event at the Historic Feed Store | 295 Central Park Drive |
| Sept. 12, 5 p.m. | Parent-and-child evening program | Highland Recreation |
None of this is designed to build hype around a single splashy weekend. It's designed to be sustainable for people doing it for free, on top of their regular lives, month after month. If you check the calendar once, see nothing exciting, and never look again, you'll miss almost everything the park actually offers, because the good stuff doesn't announce itself with a countdown. It just recurs.
How To Actually Use This If You're Already Here
The practical version: pick a Saturday that falls on the first full weekend of the month, ride the train in the morning before the Florida sun gets serious, then let the kids loose on the Rainbow Rotary Playground, described as one of the largest and most accessible playgrounds in Central Florida. It includes a merry-go-round, climbing boulders, a two-story play structure, a 15-foot space net, and a train-themed section that keeps the railroad's theme going even after you've stepped off the tracks.
If your timing lines up with a fourth Saturday, swing back in the evening for the market at Ulmer Park. If it's a Thursday and there's a Tonne Playhouse show on the calendar, that's a low-key date night that doesn't require a drive to downtown Clearwater or Tampa.
One honest caveat: local coverage doesn't even agree on how big the park is. A piece marking the park's 30th anniversary in 2025 put the total at 70 acres, while a separate feature on the railroad's setting inside the park calls it 28 acres. The likely explanation is that one figure counts only the green space immediately around the tracks and playground, while the other includes the library, nature preserve, and performing arts complex that share the same block. Either way, it's more ground than most people realize when they picture "the park with the trains."
What This Actually Says About Largo
None of this is really about trains. It's about what a city chooses to preserve when it has the option to start over. Largo could have cleared that fairgrounds lot in 1995 and built a conventional park with a conventional vendor-run attraction. Instead it kept a scrappy hobby club's track, and thirty-five years after that club laid its first rail, it's still the reason the park draws visitors from across the county. The same instinct kept the Feed Store standing and shaped the Performing Arts Center's renovation instead of a teardown. If you're trying to understand what makes this particular pocket of Pinellas County feel different from a master-planned district somewhere else in the bay, that's most of your answer. It isn't the amenities. It's who was allowed to keep running them.
If you're already calling Largo home, you probably knew about the trains. Maybe you didn't know they got here first. Either way, that's the kind of detail I like keeping track of, because knowing a place well enough to explain it beats knowing it well enough to just live near it. If you're thinking about a move in or out of this pocket of Pinellas County, or just want someone local to talk through what a neighborhood is actually like day to day, Jenny Sells The Block Tampa is a good place to start that conversation. Let's chat, find homes, or sell with confidence.
