Airport gives peek at new shuttle train
The newest train in Central Florida dips, curves and echoes European sleekness during its threeminute, 1.25-mile dash between the present and the future at Orlando International Airport.
The newly installed shuttle system is slated to open by the holidays, according to airport officials, linking the crowded terminal and parking garages with a new 2,400-space garage to the south, where construction has begun on a second terminal.
That additional parking, a retrofit of ticket lobbies and other measures are expected by next year to give the airport some temporary breathing room, boosting its capacity from 40 million to 45 million passengers annually. The airport is the nation’s 13th busiest, now handling nearly 44 million a year.
Stan Thornton, chief operating officer for the airport’s manager, the Greater Orlando Aviation
Authority, said those improvements should ease crowding for about three years. After that, “it’s going to get tight again,” he said.
But by then, according to airport officials, the new terminal’s first phase should be poised to open.
Nearly $4 billion in airport renovation and construction is unfolding, eclipsing the $2.3 billion overhaul of Interstate 4 through Orlando.
The authority offered a preview Thursday of the shuttles and their station at the edge of vast mud flat where the rest of the terminal complex will rise.
Construction is wrapping up, and cleaning crews are at work, including on a heavy coat of dust obscuring the tubular glass shafts where shuttles arrive and depart.
The shuttle station has soaring proportions and abuts the parking garage and a station built for the Brightline train between Miami and Orlando.
Substantially finished are Brightline’s ticketing floor and the platforms beneath that will serve the railroad’s three tracks.
Airport director Phil Brown said the authority expects Brightline service, though beset by unfriendly lawsuits and legislation, to begin in 2020.
Next to Brightline’s platforms is space for a proposed but uncertain link with the SunRail commuter train and with an even less certain light-rail system to the tourism district.
The south terminal has a conceptual capacity of 120 gates. That’s as large as the airport’s current terminal, which opened in the early 1980s, with major expansions since then.
For the near future, the south terminal will open with 16 gates in late 2020, Brown said, adding that “we expect JetBlue is going to be one of the principal carriers” there.
Brown said the path to the new terminal campus has been filed with detours.
“In the late ’90s we got approval and then 9/11 occurred, and we stepped back,” Brown said. “In 2006, we were going to move forward, and the recession hit and we stepped back.”
The shuttle trains will be a hit for kids — there are handles for standing at a train’s front, which suggests a nose cone.
More significantly, the shuttles are expected to ease woes at the airport’s three parking garages, which often fill to capacity.
Thornton said the authority’s hope is that passengers find it more convenient to park in the new garage, check bags there and ride the new shuttle to the north terminal.
If Central Florida’s SunRail trains suggest oldschool locomotive, the new shuttles are boxy but aggressively so, with their front ends stylized by blackened, angular windows.
The Orlando airport is replacing its oldest shuttles, an upgrade that has seen breakdowns and stranded passengers.
But the original shuttles operate on single tracks between the terminal and outlying gates; if a shuttle stalls, its track also goes out of commission.
The new shuttles utilize a set of tracks that interweave, providing redundancy and allowing several trains to operate at a time.
As promised, the new shuttle station and adjoining “boulevard” are spacious.
Eventually, the lofty boulevard will be a key architectural feature, linking the shuttle and train stations, a transportation center for buses and rental cars, and the south terminal.
“This evokes Central Florida,” Brown said. “If you look at the original design we have in the north terminal, it’s open, light, foliage. We are trying to echo that and bring it into the 21st century.”