Brightline Thread (East and West)

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One of so many.

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https://www.miamiherald.com/news/local/article311852364.html

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Merry upcoming Christmas!

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Smoke and mirrors?

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Sounds like they didnā€™t replace the brake shoes.

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I thought they put the kibosh on the station in Stuart?

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Brightline should just be integrated into Amtrak, which I believe is still statutorily authorized to take over the passenger operations of bankrupt railroads, which it did upon being founded in the 1970s.

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uh oh

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Contrary to what Cato and all the other conservative brain think tanks have claimed for years, it turns out itā€™s pretty damn difficult to make profitable a train service venture when the company is also responsible for all the capital intensive infrastructure, something the rest of the world has understood since about WW2.

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Or said another way: Operate a service thatā€™s at least partially publicly funded over publicly owned infrastructure or operate a private service over publicly owned infrastructure as an open access concession. Thereā€™s a reason a private company operating passenger trains on their own private infrastructure has been as rare as hens teeth worldwide for the past 50 years. Because itā€™s a business model that places an extraordinary burden on the enterprise in the form of both upfront and longterm capital requirements. The only reason privately owned passenger service lasted as long as it did in the US is because it was subsidized by the railroads profitable freight operations. That and governmentsā€™ pre-deregulation service requirements that caused the railroads to hemorrage money. With the exception of a few privately operated commuter services, this mostly came to an end with the NPRC, better known as Amtrak.

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There was also the Railway Express Agency cooperation with passenger trains and the U.S. postal service ran mail cars, which enabled mail to be shipped via the many passenger trains. When the REA went bust, that further impacted the profitability of passenger trains as jet-powered aircraft became common, and the highway system resulted in mail being shipped via those methods increasing competition and clients were shifting to those modes of mail shipment. The post office railcars went away for similar reasons as well.

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Very true.