The 18.5-mile standard-gauge Union Cypress Railway was built to carry logs from George W. Hopkins's large cypress and pine holdings at Deer Park to the Union Cypress sawmill just south of Melbourne. Two new and seven used steam locomotives eventually ran on fifty-pound rails, crossing the St. Johns River on a 2,850-foot wooden trestle south of Lake Sawgrass. It created the first direct route across the St. Johns River for eighty miles south of Enterprise, six years before the Kissimmee Highway (U.S. 192), and reduced Melbourne-to-Kissimmee travel to fifty-three miles instead of the previous one hundred twenty-eight miles by rail or one hundred fifty-three miles by road. The railway opened the vast prairie lands along the St. Johns to settlement and carried much of the region's commerce, including cut timber, naval stores, livestock, farm produce, passengers, and everyday supplies. Trains also ferried automobiles across the marsh on flat cars when floods closed the Kissimmee Highway. Logging and railway operations ended after Hopkins died in January 1925. Foshee Manufacturing Co. took over in March 1928 and operated until late 1932, when a declining lumber market during the Great Depression forced it to quit. Only the skeletal St. Johns River trestle remains today.