A 'Death Train' Is Haunting South Florida

[douglas9]

The Brightline is a beautiful train. Ultra-quiet and decorated with streaks of highlighter yellow, it carries passengers between Miami and Orlando, sometimes moving as fast as 125 miles per hour. It restores glamour to the humble railroad: During your ride, if you wish, you can order a half bottle of Veuve Clicquot for $59; the on-board bathrooms are large and clean enough to take a decent mirror selfie in. Condé Nast Traveler has called it “super chic.”

Privately owned and operated and transporting about 250,000 passengers a month, the Brightline is only the second high-speed train in the United States and the first outside the Northeast Corridor, where Amtrak operates the Acela. Its newness and sleekness make it a novelty in a country where trains are mostly old and ugly. Its existence shows that America can still build great things and that private industry can build them quickly and with style. If a beautiful high-speed train can work in Florida—whose former governor famously rejected more than $2 billion in federal funding for such a train—maybe it can work anywhere. But right now, something is very wrong.

What the Brightline is best known for is not that it reflects the gleam of the future but the fact that it keeps hitting people. According to Federal Railroad Administration data, the Brightline has been involved in at least 185 fatalities, 148 of which were believed not to be suicides, since it began operating, in December 2017. Last year, the train hit and killed 41 people—none of whom, as best as authorities could determine, was attempting to harm themselves. By comparison, the Long Island Rail Road, the busiest commuter line in the country, hit and killed six people last year while running 947 trains a day. Brightline was running 32.


https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/2025/10/brightline-train-florida/684624/