If you have been following the updates over the last month at southeastroads.com, you will have noticed that I’ve shifted my focus to the Interstate 4 corridor and greater Orlando. With the Keys pages completed, I wanted to shift my focus back to the Northeast, but in the process with a project at work, I was drawn to the Orlando area and noted that our Interstate 4 guides were vastly lacking. Having good portions of the freeway documented within the last year (some in decent lighting, others in marginal lighting), I’ve undertaken the process of splitting the existing guide into segments based upon county and also pages based upon direction traveled. Completed as of yesterday evening are east and westbound in Osceola, Orange, Seminole, and Volusia Counties. Polk and Hillsborough are on deck, but are going to have to wait until at least next week. The reason being, we are headed to Orlando for part of the weekend to redocument parts of the freeway network and to drive other parts of the toll road system for the first time.

As of right now, I have very few photos of Florida 417 Toll (Central Florida Greeneway), and some photos (all looking west or south into the sun through a bug splattered windshield) of Florida 429 Toll (Daniel Webster Western Beltway) and Florida 408 Toll (Holland East-West Expressway). Fortunately through the efforts of Justin from the past couple of years, I have many photos to fill in those gaps with. So this weekend I hope to travel the reverse directions of what he did in 2004 to both clinch and document the toll roads that we need at the same time. Mainly, I’ll cover Florida 417 and 429 Toll, and then perhaps some of the more roadworthy arterials too. Florida 528 Toll is covered in both directions by myself and Justin earlier this year and from 2004 (I’ll create a guide for that at some point soon too).

December 29, 2005 look at the Seminole Expressway (Florida 417 Toll) southbound beginning near Sanford.

The portions of the toll road system outside of Orange County are part of the Florida’s Turnpike system. Portions of the toll roads within Orange County are maintained by the Orlando-Orange County Expressway Authority.

As of July 27, 2006, and pictured here on December 29, 2005, the southern terminus of Florida 429 Toll (Western Beltway) was located at the junction with U.S. 129 west of Disney and east of Four Corners.

The remainder of the beltway should open to traffic by year’s end or early 2007.

Myself, Justin, Rob D., Dan “SPUI” Moraseski, and Gene Janczynskyi visited the future Florida 429 Toll (Western Beltway) stack interchange with Interstate 4 during the Orlando Road Meet and a freak thunderstorm.

View looks west from Osceola County 545 (Lake Wilson Road).