Trip Report - Amtrak Silver Meteor (Miami-Orlando)

My trip to Miami was... frantic.

An early morning Brightline trip that I utterly failed to recover any sleep on, combined with my weak suburban legs hoofing it in circles downtown meant that I ended up sleeping througth most of the day I was planning to fill with various hispanic & central american foods. Add onto that an early morning Amtrak trip that meant I couldn't stay up late either, and my day in Miami slipped by pretty fast. As soon as I'd regained my bearings, it was time to head back home.

Clambering as quiet as possible out of a plywood hostel bunk bed, I walked through Little Havana in the pre-dawn moonlight and rode a packed bus into downtown Miami, where I'd take Metrorail to the edge of the city towards Amtrak.

Government Center, seen above, is a slightly labyrinthine station attached to a Miami-Dade County complex, providing stations for both Metrorail- Miami's heavy rail mass transit- and the Metromover, an automated peoplemover. 

I think the Miami Metrorail system is incredibly underrated- it's an honest to god heavy rail mass transit system, with peak intervals of 10 minutes and modern stock. I only used it briefly on this trip, but it was completely painless, arguably nicer than some of the cars I rode in Chicago (on par with the newer cars they have on the Blue Line)

Now, for a violent shift in quality....

To get from Downtown Miami to the Miami Amtrak station, you take a shiny Metrorail train north to the transfer station with the Miami-area commuter rail service, Tri-Rail. Unfortunately for me (and any other pedestrian traveler), there's no direct connection to Amtrak, and so instead you have to walk a mercifully short half mile across some truly dreadful low-rise light industrial. I didn't really want to savor the moment, so I don't have a photo, but I'm sure you can picture the area- low slung warehouses and auto body shops, connected with a web of cracked asphalt and narrow sidewalks interrupted by utility poles and hemmed in by damaged cars. On a whole I'm actually ambivalent on these places- they kinda need to exist, New York would cease to function without the warehouses and truck yards across the river in New Jersey, yknow? But they certainly don't make for a great pedestrian experience.

The station building itself is honestly not bad; it's one of two "300A" stations put up by Amtrak, the biggest and bougiest of the Amshacks built by the Standard Stations Program.^[1] It's spacious, well-maintained, and for car-arriving passengers, perfectly accessible. The pedestrian access is really it's major black mark.

On the inside, you're treated to a large waiting room with what may well be original bucket seating, a ticket window, and a wonderful mural on a set of stairs up to a disused lounge area.

This is where your experience diverges from Brightline. There, you pass your bag through a scanner, and provided nothing is amiss, you're waved through with barely a word. You clamber down a flight of stairs to the platform and seat yourself at your pre-allocated seat, barely interacting with another human being. Amtrak is a much more human experience, and in my opinion that's for the better, at least if you're a leisure traveler like myself. A station attendant goes to the front of the room and in a booming voice gives out an explanation of boarding procedures to the whole crowd, and eventually groups are called, first class and people with walkers, wheelchairs, strollers, and large luggage first ahead of the blob of standard coach travelers. 

Making your way down the platform you're funneled off by destination- riders who were only on till Orlando one way, all the way to New York another, and then you seat yourself in whatever slots are availiable. This isn't standard on all Amtrak routes from what I hear, but it's whats in play here.

Amtrak's interiors are a tradeoff- I think the seats on Amtrak are markedly nicer, and despite the same 2-2 configuration are much less cramped than Brightline's seats, which feel like they were ordered out of the same catalog used to equip economy airlines. The outlets are less nice- owing to their age, Amtrak's are simple outlets, as opposed to Brightline's swiss army knife with inbuilt USB-A and C, but unless you're some kind of ultralight travel enthusiast, you probably carry the wall wart with your charging cable anyway. 

After a short while you get underway, at a more relaxed, clickity-clack pace, as Amtrak winds it's way through the center of the state. While a majority of the route is shared with CSX, I don't think we ever had to delay to let a freight train pass, which was nice. In the Miami and Orlando metro areas, it also dips into track owned by Tri-Rail and SunRail, respectively.

Once underway you're free to get up and stretch your legs, and if you're hungry, make your way down to the Cafe Car. On Brightline, food is streamlined similar to boarding- your menu is pre-stocked at your seat alongside the safety card, and you scan a QR code to order & pay on your phone. A short while later, your overpriced pretzels and undersized water bottle are delivered to your seat by a smiling attendant. The efficency of an airline, on the ground.

I won't beat around the bush with the Amtrak cafe car- your Hebrew National™ All-Beef Hot Dog is microwaved, bun and all, right in front of your eyes. I'm sure both the average Miami commuter and my doctor would prefer a Mediterranean "bento box" as served by Brightline. But I sure as hell enjoyed my hot dog and a Coke, served in a paper tray folded in one swift motion the clerk looks like he could do in his sleep, a lot more, and I paid more sensible government rates for the privilege. All in the click-clack comfort of a cafe car booth, across from a button-up wearing man in his 40s who unfolded a business laptop followed by cracking a canned light beer. That's America baby.

You disembark in Orlando at a much more classical station, a large Mission-styled building first built by the Atlantic Coast Line in 1926 and now somewhat isolated in a sea of more modern buildings that comprise Orlando Health's "downtown" campus.

Inside, it's the jumbled anachronistic stew found inside many a major Amtrak station. Beautiful curved wooden-slat benches have been restored alongside a beleaguered, hand-updated plastic-letter departures board and a shuttered ticket counter emblazoned with the newest sans-serif Amtrak logo. Original wooden payphone enclosures sit empty, gutted of 90s-era payphones, alongside a sign inviting customers to text their station experience on their smartphone. I can't say it's perfect, but it's certainly fun to look at, all the little remnants of various ages built up like sandstone.

My trip ended with a bus ride back to the airport to pick up my car, taking Orlando's bus system- LYNX, adding our final transit agency to the trip. Lynx is a pretty nice, it's busses are modern and painted in an array of eye-catching colors, and the cat themeing is pretty cute.^[2] The frequencies could be better, but with a city as sprawling as Orlando and a state as hostile to public works as Florida, I'll give it some slack. 

That ends our transit adventures! I'm unsure if I'll be able to pull off any other major transit rides before I leave Florida- like riding the length of SunRail, or St Petersburg's SunRunner BRT, or even just some more casual system explorations for municipal bus systems like Lynx. Only time will tell. 

Also, if you want to see more of my adventures and day-to-day finds, I've started uploading to Flickr again, aiming for daily uploads. I certainly have enough backlog.

Until next time!

[1] and the only one left in operation after Midway (St Paul/Minneapolis) was closed and mothballed in 2014.
[2] If I had a nickel for every cat-themed transit system I've ridden, I'd have two nickels. Which isn't a lot, but it's weird that it happened twice. (The other being Savannah's Chatham Area Transit, CAT)