Blood on the tracks
America’s most novel train project is too deadly
The government may be more responsible than the operator
TO RIDE ON Brightline, a private passenger train in Florida, is a luxurious experience.
A “premium” journey begins in a lounge with four kinds of beer on tap; the train itself has smart leather seats and a bar service with champagne.
It is a lot better than driving on the state’s famously congested roads, and faster too.
Often it is cheaper than flying.
In 2023 the firm opened the first new private passenger train track in America in over a century, expanding service from Miami to Orlando (see map).
Brightline’s growth offers hope that private enterprise could bring to America a new golden age of rail.
There is just one rather unfortunate problem.
People keep getting hit by its trains.
In 2024 Brightline transported 2.8m people in Florida.
But 41 people also died in accidents involving its trains, according to the Federal Railroad Administration (FRA).
Its data excludes suicides.
Since launching in 2018 over 180 people have been killed, including suicide cases, according to data collated by the Miami Herald.
“When we first started running from Orlando, it was pretty much once a week,” says a worker on the train.
Employee turnover is high, the worker says, especially among conductors who sit at the front.
“Some of them have seen people get hit and seen bodies fly past the windows and that kind of messes them up.”
America’s trains in general are surprisingly dangerous.
In 2024 over 900 people were killed in accidents across the entire system, including by freight trains.
Yet Brightline is deadlier than most.
On Amtrak, the national passenger railway, there were 148 deaths, for 33m passenger journeys (again, excluding suicides).
That makes Brightline over three times deadlier per passenger than Amtrak.
By international standards, the death toll is astonishing.
In the year to March 2025 Britain’s railways transported 1.7bn people and around a dozen people were killed on train tracks.
Why so deadly?
The proximate cause is that Americans cannot seem to help themselves from walking or driving on railway tracks when they should not.
The FRA data show that all of the accidental fatalities on Brightline tracks last year involved trespassers.
“If you’re pointing the finger at the train, you’re looking at the wrong source of the problem,” says Alfred Sanchez, head of the Greater Miami Chamber of Commerce.
On his daily commute home he used to cross a Brightline track and would see people trying to manoeuvre past the guardrails—in cars, on foot and on bikes.
“I don’t know why people don’t take it more seriously here, but they do not take it more seriously,” he says.
Another cause of the death toll is that it is unusually easy to get onto the tracks.
Roughly 3m cars cross the Brightline tracks each day at over 300 street crossings.
Of those, almost a third do not have “quad gates” designed to make it harder to drive around.
Nor is there much fencing to keep pedestrians off the tracks.
America’s railways have barely been upgraded in over a century.
With the exception of its new leg to Orlando, Brightline travels on tracks built in the late 1800s that previously were used almost exclusively by freight trains.
Its passenger trains go faster than trundling freight trains—at 125mph in sections—and some drivers may not realise how little time they have to get across.
Brightline has worked with local police to set up “scarecrow” patrol cars by the crossings and got Waze, a navigation system, to alert drivers when they are about to cross the tracks.
The firm has invested $230m to upgrade crossings since 2018.
They say that incidents where a train hit a person, car, bike or scooter fell by 13% last year.
But people living and running businesses by the railway have advocated for even the deadliest crossings to stay open because they are convenient—and local politicians too often placate them.
The state of Florida, which controls the intersections, has taken a backseat in all this.
“The tragic fact is that these incidents are preventable,” says a Brightline spokesperson.
“We all need to do our part.”
If Brightline had to elevate the tracks or fence the railway, it would not be viable as a business.
Indeed, it may not be anyway.
Last year the firm, which is owned by an international private-equity group, had to pay 14% interest to refinance almost $1bn in debt.
Ridership and revenue are growing fast, but at nowhere near the especially rosy rates projected to investors.
Brightline is a far more pleasant experience than driving or flying, but competing with road transport is tricky, especially in a sprawling place like Florida.
However much better the train experience is, people often need their cars when they arrive.
Britain has replaced hundreds of level crossings in recent years.
In Florida, by contrast, safety tends not to take priority over keeping costs down.
Six years ago Ron DeSantis, the governor, started looking into the problem.
Too little has been done since.
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