The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Travel
How car-free Florida just became simple
A brand new train connecting Orlando and Miami in just over three hours means you won’t need to get behind the wheel on your next multi-centre break in the Sunshine State. Chris Leadbeater hops aboard
Yellow. That is the first impression. It is everywhere in the Miami terminus. On the walls, the lifts, the elevators, the door frames, the info-screens – and on the sides of the trains themselves. A firm, unabashed yellow. Less shiny than gold, but lighter than that classic shade of American hotdog mustard. Not quite orange either, stopping somewhere just short of the synthetic hue of processed cheese. And bright? Oh yes, it is certainly bright. When it comes to the first syllable of its name, the Brightline service delivers.
Venture a little further, and you’ll soon find the second syllable is present and correct too. Because there at the top of the stairs, elevated above street level, is the railway line: a double track arrowing away to the north – blazing a trail up the eastern flank of the Florida peninsula.
It does so with considerable similarity to the Eurostar. Before you can gain access to the platform, there are security scanners and X-ray machines – every passenger and every bag has to be checked. There are allocated seats. There is a formal boarding procedure, organised and efficient. And once you are inside, there are roomy carriages – each clean and air-conditioned. All the sleek accoutrements, in other words, of modern train travel.
Which is novel. Because sleekness and modernity are not generally concepts associated with rail journeys in America. For all that it connects 46 of the 50 states (and at remarkably low cost to travellers), the Amtrak system is viewed, with a sizeable dollop of injustice, as clunky and unreliable – and, with a fair amount of accuracy, as slow and steady rather than fast and fabulous; a conduit for leisurely trips, rather than rapid transit.
The new Brightline service – trains began running the full length of the line, from Miami to Orlando, last month – has set itself as the antithesis of “slow and steady”.
It has definitely been speedy in its dash from drawing board to reality. What is the first privately funded rail system in the USA for over a century was barely a whisper a decade ago. Work began in 2014, with site clearance for the stations in Miami and Fort Lauderdale. And while trains started rolling between the latter and West Palm Beach in January 2018, the laying of track for the northern half of the network, between West Palm Beach and Orlando – including the section where the line turns inland at Cocoa, and charges west in search of the city of Mickey Mouse – did not even begin until June 2019.
Admittedly, this isn’t quite the engineering miracle it seems. In creating its infrastructure, Brightline has made the most of what was already available, using existing trackbeds and rail corridors. In part, this meant dovetailing with the Florida East Coast Railway – the pioneering line, built by the industrialist Henry Flagler between 1885 and 1912, that has linked cities on Florida’s Atlantic coast for over a century, but is now largely devoted to freight (Amtrak passenger trains takes a different route through the state). Still, the investment has been significant. Brightline has spent $6.4bn (£5.3bn) in total – on upgrading the track for highspeed passenger trains, and on making the nuts and bolts of the route fit for the 21st century (56 new bridges, three underpasses and the modernisation of 156 level crossings).
The final piece of an elaborate jigsaw has been a second terminus (for now) in Orlando; a showpiece station, attached to Terminal C of the city’s international airport, that opened with the first trains south on September 22. All the yellow branding visible in Miami is repeated here, as is a bar, serving beers and cocktails, where the sign above the spirit rack reads “Mary Mary”. This is a quiet tribute – two of Flagler’s three wives were so-named.
There are up to 32 trains a day (16 each way) between Miami and Orlando. While the time they take is not swift in European terms (the Eurostar takes two and a quarter hours to cover the 305 miles from London to Paris; the Brightline three and a half to cover just 235 miles), it is lightning-fast for Florida, hitting 125mph on the 37 miles of track between Orlando and Cocoa (the 79mph limit between West Palm Beach and Miami causes the later deceleration).
Nor is this the end of the story. The historic Flagler railway goes all the way north to Jacksonville; so extending the Brightline to what is Florida’s largest city is “just” a matter of installing better track. Orlando, meanwhile, is unlikely to be the end of the line for long. Plans are in place to keep building the route towards the Gulf coast – to Tampa.
If the network provides a potential commuter route between cities, particularly Miami and Fort Lauderdale (there is optimistic talk of taking three million cars off the road every year), Brightline is a splendiferous gift to travellers who want to tour the Sunshine State without getting behind the wheel. It is now possible to plot a holiday path across the southern half of the state where the train takes the strain (see sidebar, below). Suddenly, some of Florida’s best-loved beach resorts share a piece of track that continues all the way to Disney World.
OK, you’ll need to grab a taxi from Orlando station to the state’s most fabled theme park (17 miles/20 mins, roughly $30), and likewise you’ll need to take a transfer between Miami’s international airport and the city’s Brightline station (a drive of roughly 20 minutes) – but the company is attempting to plug some of these gaps with its own shuttle buses between its stations and the airports in Miami and Fort Lauderdale (costing $10 for the first passenger, and $5 for each subsequent rider). It is also pushing itself as a community transport network, with further shuttles between its stations and some of the area’s major sports arenas (those of the Miami Dolphins and Inter Miami, for example) on match days.
Early signs suggest this is proving popular: the trains I travelled on last month were sold out. And the story will not end in Tampa or Jacksonville. Visit the company website and you find details on “Brightline West”, which is set to be a similar 218-mile link between Las Vegas and the outer edge of the Los Angeles conurbation (at Rancho Cucamonga) by 2027. The American railway, so long a symbol of the past, is now one of the future.