The Florida Western and Northern Railroad was a subsidiary of the Seaboard Air Line Railroad that expanded their network in the 1920s by building a rail line from Coleman, Florida (near Wildwood) all the way to West Palm Beach via Auburndale and Sebring (near Lake Okeechobee), a distance of 204 miles.

From here, it continued through southern Central Florida, passing through Winter Haven, West Lake Wales, Avon Park, and Sebring.

The line was beginning of Seaboard president S. Davies Warfield's ambitious plan to connect the Seaboard network to the South Florida region, which for almost thirty years had been the exclusive domain of the Florida East Coast Railway.

[1]: 143 The line only briefly terminated in West Palm Beach before Seaboard organized another subsidiary, the Seaboard-All Florida Railway, to extend it to Miami which was completed in January 1927.

[2] The Cross State Limited also ran the line, which was one of the first rail services to connect Tampa and Miami directly.

[3]: 75  The Cross State Limited ran the Valrico Subdivision from West Lake Wales to access Tampa.

It became their main route through southern Central Florida and segments of the Atlantic Coast Line's parallel Haines City Branch were abandoned.

The Auburndale Subdivision runs in a roughly parallel trajectory to U.S. Route 27 between Avon Park and Sebring, and from Okeechobee to West Palm Beach, the line directly parallels State Road 710 which in some places known as Warfield Boulevard (named after Seaboard president S. Davies Warfield).