Brightline Orlando Extension Provides Fast, Smooth Trip
Is it high-speed or not? Watch it blow past the traffic on Florida Highway 528 and decide for yourself
When I lived in Brooklyn in the late 1970s and early 1980s New York City Transit ran an extra-fare super express between Midtown Manhattan and JFK Airport known, appropriately enough, as the JFK Express. They promoted it with a catchy jingle, “Take the train to the plane!”
Yesterday I took the plane to the train. I flew from New York to Orlando to ride Brightline from Orlando International Airport to West Palm Beach.
I had been looking forward to making this trip for a long time and hoped to ride on Day One. Since the service debuted on a Friday that was not in the cards. So I missed the ribbon cutting and other hoopla and rode the Orlando extension on Day Five when it was already in “business as usual” mode.
My flight on JetBlue was 15 minutes late due to mechanical problems that were fixed in New York. I wasn’t too concerned since I still had an hour and 20 minutes to catch the train.
The engineer pushed the throttle to the max and within a few minutes we were zipping past the traffic at top speed.
JetBlue uses Terminal C, which is where I thought the Brightline station was located. Not exactly. The station is on the other side of the Terminal C parking garage.
This meant a half-mile hike from the gate with multiple elevator and escalator rides along the way through a facility I was not familiar with. I grabbed a burger to go at the Shake Shack in Terminal C but by the time I sat down to eat it in the concourse outside Brightline it was cold.
The concourse is a beautiful space with high ceilings, but with Brightline its only occupant it was nearly empty and eerily quiet. The station is smaller than I expected; too small, IMHO, to comfortably accommodate a full load of passengers. A separate lounge for premium class passengers, a small store, and Brightline’s well-patronized Mary Mary bar take up most of the space.
About ten minutes prior to departure time a pre-boarding announcement came over the loudspeaker and passengers began to queue near the gate for track one. My guesstimate is somewhere between 50 and 100 passengers boarded at Orlando bound for West Palm Beach, Fort Lauderdale, Aventura, and Miami.
The train consisted of three Smart Class (coach) and one Premium Class (business class) cars between locomotives on either end. It was named Bright Blue and was painted in a color scheme that featured blue accents.
I had a reserved window seat in the middle of the third Smart Class car. Since the load was light no one was sitting next to me. Seats were comfortable and had plenty of leg room. They only recline forward a few inches and the fold-down table is set too high for writing.
At exactly 2:54 pm, the scheduled time, the train left the station. It ran at a low speed through the airport and then around a sweeping curve that brought us alongside Florida Highway 528, which the right of way parallels to Cocoa.
Then the fun began. The engineer pushed the throttle to the max and within a few minutes we were zipping past the traffic at top speed. Trains are permitted to go 125 mph, and I believe we hit that mark. However, I can not attest to how fast the train was moving because Waze, my GPS app, could not get a signal.
My previous post about the launch of Orlando service touched off a lively debate on more than one Facebook group about whether Brightline qualifies as “high-speed rail.” Some argued that a train has to do better than 125 to be “high-speed.” Some say 125 is the lowest speed considered “high speed.”
I could imagine Talmudic scholars spending months working this out, but the argument is meaningless and has nothing to do with whether Brightline is a good train, which it is. FWIW, I offer my own definition: If it’s fast enough for a trooper to pull you over on the interstate it’s high speed.
Regardless, Brightline is the fastest US train away from the Northeast Corridor.
The leg between Orlando and Cocoa has little to offer in the way of scenery. Much of the area is undeveloped. The highlight was crossing the St. John’s River, which is Florida’s longest. At the location it is not much more than a couple of streams meandering through miles of wetlands.
As it neared Cocoa the train entered a tunnel to duck under Highway 528. Shortly after, it took a sweeping reverse curve alongside a pond to pass under the highway a second time and come alongside the Florida East Coast Railroad (FEC).
Between Cocoa and Miami Brightline uses trackage rights to run over the FEC, which is a busy freight carrier and former Brightline investor. Because of the freight traffic and numerous grade crossing along the route, Brightline’s top speed is 110 mph between Cocoa and West Palm Beach and 79 mph from there to Miami.
Brightline made major upgrades to operate over this line. It is once again double track and has additional crossovers and passing sidings. A new signal system was installed and all the fixed bridges were replaced. In addition, all grade crossings are now protected by four-quadrant gates with bells and flashing lights.
There is a lot more to see along this leg, too. The train passed through small coastal cities such as Melbourne, Vero Beach, and Fort Pierce. Between Fort Pierce and Port Saint Lucie I got glimpses of the Indian River, aka Intracoastal Waterway.
We crossed several creeks and ran through 10,500 acre-Jonathan Dickinson State Park. The highlight for me was crossing the St. Lucie River on a century-old bascule bridge at 10 mph.
A few minutes later, the train traversed the new bascule bridge over the Loxahatchie River in Jupiter. That was my signal that the train was approaching West Palm Beach so I started to gather my belongings and prepare to depart the train. We pulled into the station exactly on time at 5:10 pm.
But I wasn’t finished riding trains. I still had to get to Delray Beach, so I walked a half mile over to the Amtrak/Tri-Rail station and got there in time to catch Tri-Rail’s 5:36 pm southbound. It was somewhat of a letdown from Brightline but it moved swiftly and got me to Delray Beach at 6 pm where my mother and her home aide were waiting to pick me up.
All-in-all, I had good trip, not withstanding the shlep from the airport to the train station. This was my third ride on Brightline so the novelty has worn off. However, once again the railroad met my expectations and then some. I highly recommend taking this train if you are in the vicinity.
The 162-mile run from Orlando to West Palm Beach took two hours and 16 minutes for an average speed of 71.5 mph. I suppose you could drive it in the same amount of time but you might get pulled over by a trooper.
An interesting question in light of the train running over the “railroad that went to sea, Art.” Until 1935, when it was destroyed by a hurricane, the Florida East Coast Railroad ran across the Florida Keys to Key West.
Since I am not a climate scientist I can’t predict how high sea levels will rise if the polar icecaps melt. For the most part the railroad is set back from the ocean and the Intracoastal Waterway, and the bridges are probably high enough to clear the higher creeks and rivers. Wash outs would be a concern but they are usually caused by running water. Also the railroad could raise the road bed. They should have sufficient time to prepare.
From your description of this route, I have a concern that the track elevation might not be sufficient to protect the route from the strong possibility that Florida will be "underwater" as a result of climate changes and poor governmental actions. What are the odds for and against this railway being flooding out?