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Brightline Blazes Through the Sunshine State
By Lindsey Ranayhossaini, Staff Writer
Year after year, Orlando’s world-famous theme parks attract millions of visitors to the Sunshine State. In fact, the city was named the No. 1 tourist destination in the United States in 2022, reporting 74 million visitors. With its beaches and vibrant nightlife scene, Miami follows close behind, volleying back and forth with Orlando for the top spot in numerous travel rankings.
Despite the high tourism traffic to these two Florida destinations, there has not been a straightforward transportation solution connecting the two, requiring visitors to rent cars for the four-hour drive or purchase airline tickets for an equally long trip when accounting for time at the airport.
“There’s a huge number of people traveling from Point A to Point B and no good transportation options,” said Andy Kunz, president of the U.S. High Speed Rail Association, a membership and trade association that advocates for expanding high speed rail travel in America.
To complicate matters, Florida has experienced explosive population growth in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, four of the nation’s top 10 metro areas for population growth from 2022 to 2023 were in Florida. The increase in new residents has further taxed state infrastructure and led to additional congestion on Florida’s roadways.
But Brightline, a provider of modern, intercity rail solutions, seeks to ease this congestion by offering consumers a third transportation option. The company’s Brightline Florida operation promises fast, reliable rail transportation between Miami and Orlando, with additional stations in Aventura, Fort Lauderdale, Boca Raton and West Palm Beach.
Using a route that partially runs on existing Florida East Coast Railway tracks, Brightline Florida’s East-West Connector was completed in September 2023. Though Brightline Florida began revenue operations in the state with its route from Fort Lauderdale to West Palm Beach in January 2018, the inception of the East-West Connector has fostered rapid growth in consumer demand for the rail service.
The route from Miami to Orlando operates with 16 trains per day, running at one-hour intervals. During the first quarter of 2024, ticket revenue totalled nearly $40 million, triple the amount of the year prior. In response to demand, Brightline has raised ticket prices and ordered additional trains to accommodate more passengers.
“What Brightline Florida has shown is that if you put a nice, new train service out there with multiple, convenient trains per hour and reliable and luxurious offerings, passengers will respond in droves,” Kunz said.
Engineering Challenges And Solutions
Before Brightline could begin operations in Florida, a herculean engineering effort was required to construct the rail line through a complicated corridor. Though Brightline utilized Florida East Coast Railway tracks to expedite the construction process for its line from Miami to Cocoa, there were numerous engineering problems to solve as the company established its new track between Cocoa and Orlando International Airport.
Brightline Florida partnered with engineering firm HNTB for assistance with program management and infrastructure design for the entirety of its 238-mile rail network, and HNTB served as engineer-of-record for the 38 route miles of track connecting Orlando and Cocoa. The design included 32 new bridges, grading, drainage, communications, signal layout and utility relocation.
“We’ve been the key office for Brightline since day one,” said George Gilhooley, office leader at HNTB. “We started out as their program manager, and that role grew continuously.”
One of the complications of building the track included working through the environmental permitting processes at the state and federal levels, Gillhooley said, as the new line passed through a lot of environmentally sensitive land where a variety of animals move.
“We did some pretty complex wildlife crossings out there to accommodate all the different species – everything from bears, to deer, to you name it cross out there,” Gilhooley said.
The solution was a shelving system constructed under the rail bridge with sections at the proper elevation for the species to cross through. Since many animals do not like to cross through water, the shelves were built above the waterline, allowing for a safe crossing under the bridge.
Environmental permitting was not the only hurdle the design team faced. At Orlando International Airport, the design team had to design the alignment of the Brightline rail through complicated airport infrastructure, including working around critical utilities.
And though utilizing Florida East Coast Railway tracks for its line between Miami and Cocoa presented Brightline with advantages, those tracks still had to be upgraded to meet the demands of faster rail speeds.
“There was a lot of work,” Gilhooley said. “We double tracked or triple tracked a lot of it out there to have the capacity to run passenger rail in addition to the freight rail that was on (the line) already, but it was also upgrading the tracks to a higher speed.”
In addition, the railroad corridor contained features like fiber optic lines and utilities, all of which had to be relocated and kept in service throughout the construction process.
The SR 528 Tunnel
Perhaps the largest design challenge the engineering team navigated was the crossing at the Interstate 95 Interchange under State Road 528, where a bridge was needed to cross the highway in order to keep the railway at grade and allow Brightline’s trains to maintain speeds of 125 miles per hour. Conventional thinking would dictate the construction of a rail bridge over the highway, but HNTB devised an alternative solution.
“We had to cross the highway, but a rail bridge is about twice the cost of a highway bridge,” Gilhooley said. “We temporarily moved 528 and put in a tunnel so that the train stayed at grade. Then we just reconstructed 528 over that tunnel and were able to essentially keep the train running at a much higher speed.”
The SR 528 tunnel was constructed during a two-week span using the box-jacking method. Box-jacking allowed for concrete boxes to be precast outside the roadway and pushed under SR 528 using hydraulic jacks. Brightline employed a specialty contractor to facilitate this process, and this was the first instance in North America where the box-jacking method was used under a highway system under live traffic.
This design reduced five separate bridges to a single 574-foot-long bridge over the south side of I-95. This solution saved Brightline $25 million and more than six months of construction time.
The Silver Bullet
Proponents of expanding high-speed rail in the U.S. characterize high speed rail transportation as a “silver bullet” solution for many of the country's transportation woes, including highway congestion, rising oil costs and complications from climate change.
“Congestion levels have reached epic proportions, where it just makes it impossible to go anywhere quickly and efficiently,” Kunz said. “Cars and aviation just can’t handle all of the people in the big, modern nation that we are. We need this third option to really be able to move the numbers of people that are trying to move around our country every day.”
Detractors argue that America is too steeped in car culture to embrace high speed rail, and the cost of constructing a high speed rail system is simply too high. Brightline invested $5 billion in its rail line extension to Orlando, and though the company reported $40 million in ticket sales in the first quarter of 2024, it also recorded $116 million in losses.
This loss, according to Kunz, was because the company chose to write down some of its construction costs.
“That’s not in any way reflective of the system not being highly successful as an operation. Kunz said. “As an operation, it’s extremely profitable.”
Brightline officials did not respond to repeated requests for an interview for this story.
The Future
Despite early losses, Brightline is forging ahead with plans to extend its Florida line from Orlando to Tampa.
“We've been developing that with them for a couple of years now,” Gilhooley said. “It's on hold right now with FDOT getting ready to start a lot of construction on a piece of I-4 that this is in the median of. So a lot of that phasing has to get worked out with them right now, but we’re about 30% done on plans for getting [the line] to Tampa.”
And in April 2024, Brightline broke ground for its Brightline West project, a 218-mile high-speed rail line that will connect Las Vegas and Rancho Cucamonga, Calif. The project, a public-private partnership, is projected to take four years to complete and will be located in the median of I-15. If all goes to plan, the new line will be ready for the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics.
The expansion of high-speed rail in the U.S. will fill a much needed transportation gap and reduce the burden currently placed on automobiles and aviation, Kunz said. As high-speed rail catches on, more consumers will appreciate the reliability and ease of rail travel.
“You can set your watch by these trains,” Kunz said. “They’re never delayed. They don’t suffer from congestion or cancellation. It just doesn’t happen in this sector.”
