Trip Report - Brightline (Orlando-Miami)

My work takes a pretty long break for Christmas- from December 23rd, through January 1st. It's one of the benefits of a soul-crushingly boring but otherwise pretty easy manufacturing job. About halfway through this break, I tend to get a little stir crazy, as absent work to drag me out of the house, I can get pretty lazy and start rotting into my chair as the calendar flies by. Last year, this prompted a lovely drive north to Savannah, a beautiful city I'll write about soon. This year, I hastily executed a plan I'd 'wanted to do' for a while now- Miami!

The difference was, I did not want to drive. Miami traffic is infamous even among Florida's bottom of the barrel standards. The roads are twisty, the drivers fast and reckless, and the cars expensive. My dad, at least 30 years removed from driving into the city proper, recounts it like a war story, and a friend of his similarly recounts a more recent near miss with a Rolls Royce on a narrow city street.

Now, these are all a bit exaggerated- it's just a city, after all. The traffic sucks, but no more than any urban area, and I've survived those before, albeit with some new knuckle-imprints in my steering wheel.  However, driving was still off the table, as a trip to Miami means you can bag a North American transit nerd's dream- high(er) speed rail. Brightline is the United States' only privately owned passenger railroad, and, on rare newly laid track between Orlando and Cocoa, it reaches a blistering 125 mph.^[1] Plans roughly laid in my head, I booked a $67 ticket from Orlando to Miami- the current full length of the system- departing dark & early at 6:50 AM.

So, 6:50 AM. Early, sure, but not murderously so. Easy, right?

Well, that'd be true. If you lived in Orlando...

The misadventures of this trip began at roughly 5 AM on December 29th, somewhere between stumbling and pouring myself out of a comfortable bed for a dark early morning drive, 1-1/2 hours to Orlando International Airport. I pulled into the liminality of an airport economy lot, and logged the trip's first form of transit- a minibus, lonely in the morning darkness, but none the less up & running to shuttle me across unwalkable, highway-grade roads to the actual terminal.

Passing through Terminal C's liminal nowhere-zone ground floor, I made towards the train station. Now, the trip very nearly failed here. While I managed to force my maladjusted vacation sleep schedule into waking that early, I didn't give myself enough of a buffer for traffic and general human ineffiency, and after sprinting through the airport, shoving my bag through an x-ray scanner, and nearly falling down a flight of stairs, I passed the threshold of a Brightline passenger car at 6:45 AM on the dot- the minute that boarding ended early for the crew to do a headcount.

Settling into my seat, I did my best to snap some photos- unfortunately, between the plexiglass dividers above the seats and the violent disagreement between the lighting in here and my phone camera's sensor, the photo I got was mixed.

Pulling out from the airport, you start smoothly on newly laid tracks between here and Cocoa, where it rejoins the much older rails of the Florida East Coast mainline. That's what you can barely see in the first photo- the unfortunately short portion where the system reaches it's peak 125 mph. Pulling onto the mainline, you sail through one story suburbs, the urbanism slowly building as you enter South Florida, and the speed slows down further to accomodate commuter-spaced stops beginning with West Palm Beach.

Disembarking in Miami, I managed to grab some much better photos in the daylight. Brightline's coach class is set up in a 2-2 configuration, with some seats facing tables and others setup normally like mine. I'd describe the ride quality as perfectly functional; owing to their newness, everything's clean, the seats have ample USB charging ports available, and the legroom beats the pants off any budget flight in existence. On that note, price wise, a Brightline ticket runs you about $15-20 more than your bottom rung Spirit flight, and takes 2-1/2 hours longer. For your time and money, you don't get jerked about with baggage fees, the security is less of a hassle, your air less stale, and you get dropped in the middle of Downtown Miami. Refreshments aren't much better though- I was pretty miffed to hand over $3 for a bottle of water, and even more so when that bottle turned out to be half-size.

The original Downtown Miami station was built here in 1912, a rather modest wooden station in the style seen up and down the FEC. By the 1960s, the City of Miami wanted it gone and replaced with a more modern structure; their got their wish in two parts, one half signifigantly delayed. A major labor strike^[2] rerouted FEC trains to Miami to the Seaboard Coast Line's station 2 miles north of Downtown, and the wooden Miami terminus was torn down in 1963, replaced with parking lots.^[3] These giant plats of asphalt stood until 2014, when site work began for the modern Miami Central pictured above.

Miami Central spans several blocks, slung underneath a pair of incredibly expensive apartment towers and an office block, and containing stations for not just Brightline but also Tri-Rail, Metrorail, the Metromover, and Miami-Dade Transit busses. A few coffee shops and fast food spots pepper the interior and exterior as well, including the pictured Mary Mary, a bar operated by Brightline and named, tongue-in-cheek, after two of Henry Flagler's wives. Cute, but also feels a little bit off-color, considering he married that 2nd Mary- Mary Lily Kenan- only 10 days after he divorced his second wife, Ida Alice Shourds. He achieved this by bribing the Florida Legislature to pass a law that made "incurable insanity" valid grounds for divorce in 1901, 5 years after he had a doctor friend of his declare her as such.^[4] I get that Ida isn't the one referenced in the name, but it still does feel kinda weird, and I wanted to share that detail.  

This early morning trip thus survived, I walked out into Miami for a short and slightly frenetic trip, ending on another early morning train- Amtrak's Silver Meteor service. But that's a journey for another time

 

 

[1] I can hear the Europeans & Asians chuckling from here
[2] I implore you to look this up- it involves a lot more dynamite than you'd first think.
[3] 1960s urbanism moment
[4] The law would be repealed in 1905, with Flagler being the only person to ever make use of it. Ida Alice Shourds would die in 1930, after spending over 30 years confined to a high endmental hospital in New York.