HomeWorldA ‘Death Train’ Is Haunting South Florida

A ‘Death Train’ Is Haunting South Florida


Photographs by Aleksey Kondratyev

The Brightline is a beautiful train. Ultra-quiet and decorated with streaks of highlighter yellow, it carries passengers between Miami and Orlando, sometimes moving as fast as 125 miles per hour. It restores glamour to the humble railroad: During your ride, if you wish, you can order a half bottle of Veuve Clicquot for $59; the on-board bathrooms are large and clean enough to take a decent mirror selfie in. Condé Nast Traveler has called it “super chic.” 

Privately owned and operated and transporting about 250,000 passengers a month, the Brightline is only the second high-speed train in the United States and the first outside the Northeast Corridor, where Amtrak operates the Acela. Its newness and sleekness make it a novelty in a country where trains are mostly old and ugly. Its existence shows that America can still build great things and that private industry can build them quickly and with style. If a beautiful high-speed train can work in Florida—whose former governor famously rejected more than $2 billion in federal funding for such a train—maybe it can work anywhere. But right now, something is very wrong.

What the Brightline is best known for is not that it reflects the gleam of the future but the fact that it keeps hitting people. According to Federal Railroad Administration data, the Brightline has been involved in at least 185 fatalities, 148 of which were believed not to be suicides, since it began operating, in December 2017. Last year, the train hit and killed 41 people—none of whom, as best as authorities could determine, was attempting to harm themselves. By comparison, the Long Island Rail Road, the busiest commuter line in the country, hit and killed six people last year while running 947 trains a day. Brightline was running 32. 

In January 2023, the National Transportation Safety Board found that the Brightline’s accident rate per million miles operated from 2018 to 2021 was more than double that of the next-highest—43.8 for the Brightline and 18.4 for the Metra commuter train in Chicago. This summer, the Miami Herald and a Florida NPR station published an investigation showing that someone is killed by the train, on average, once every 13 days. 

Floridians have started calling it the “Death Train” and maintain a sense of gallows humor about it, saying that it must be “fed” regularly to keep hurricanes away. Train attendants told me that Brightline engineers and conductors sometimes darkly joke about earning a “golden ticket”—which is when the train hits someone at the right time so that the three paid days off a worker gets for emotional distress are rolled into a weekend that takes up most of the week.

Brightline argues that the “Death Train” moniker is unfair for many reasons. One is the notorious difficulty of determining whether a death on a train track was a suicide. The company says the true rate of suicides on its Florida route is higher than government agencies report because of the variability in how local law-enforcement agencies and medical examiners make their determinations. Although Brightline no longer insists, as it has in the past, that the majority of the deaths are the result of suicides or drugs, it still takes care to frame the issue as a matter of personal responsibility. None of the deaths on Brightline tracks has been the result of equipment failure or operator error, Ashley Blasewitz, Brightline’s director of media relations, wrote to me in an email. “All have been the result of illegal, deliberate and oftentimes reckless behavior by people putting themselves in harm’s way.”

Federal agencies have investigated the Brightline incidents and produced no firm conclusions about why they have happened so often. The company, sometimes called “Frightline” on the local news, has not been found responsible for any of the deaths. How could it be responsible for people driving around lowered gates or walking into the clearly delineated path of a train? Yet there must be some explanation for the unusual number of fatalities. 

Brightline’s parent company aspires to create additional train routes all over the country. It has been embraced by pro-transit wonks and former President Joe Biden’s train-nerd transportation secretary, Pete Buttigieg, as well as by tech-world influencers and members of the Trump administration. In a February press release announcing that it would investigate a federally funded California high-speed-rail project that has become a decade-plus boondoggle, Donald Trump’s Department of Transportation praised Brightline by comparison, citing its “impressive work” on Brightline West, the company’s second route. Still under construction, Brightline West will connect Las Vegas to the Los Angeles suburbs with a train that can go up to 200 miles per hour.  

If Brightline really is the future of rail in the United States, the most important question is obvious: Why are so many people dying?

Aleksey Kondratyev for The Atlantic
Ultra-quiet and decorated with streaks of highlighter yellow, the Brightline carries passengers between Miami and Orlando, sometimes moving as fast as 125 miles per hour.

A popular theory of the Brightline deaths, which you’ll see in comments underneath viral videos of the train plowing into cars, is that there is something wrong with people who live in Florida. Specifically, these comments invoke the concept of the “Florida Man”—a long-standing meme that suggests the state is, in essence, full of morons.  

Jim Kovalsky, the president of a nonprofit called the Florida East Coast Railway Society, appeared exasperated in a local-TV interview last year. “If you don’t put yourself between those two steel rails, you’re not going to get hit by a train,” he said. When I spoke with him earlier this year, he was even more direct. “I think the concept of Florida Man is real,” he said. “Unfortunately, we are dealing with a lot of people that don’t understand self-preservation.” 

But if the people of Florida were uniquely stupid in a way that made them more susceptible to being hit by trains, you would expect them to be hit uncommonly often by all trains. This is not the case. Amtrak serves fewer passengers than Brightline, but operates through many of the same urban areas as well as some additional ones, and it reported six total fatalities in the state in 2024, compared with Brightline’s 41. The NTSB’s 2023 report found that Brightline’s accident rate per million miles was more than eight times that of SunRail, another commuter train that operates around Orlando. Brightline has challenged the usefulness of this statistic, noting that it doesn’t account for the amount of daily traffic around and on the tracks, but that is sort of the point. 

The Brightline runs on the route of the original Florida East Coast Railway, which was built in the late 1800s by Henry Flagler, a Standard Oil tycoon. Flagler is popularly credited with “inventing” modern Florida: His railroad allowed for the development of swampland into a series of luxury resorts dotting the coast. Everything grew up around this track—it’s the vein running through all of the oldest cities and most densely populated areas of South Florida.

Passenger trains stopped running on this line in the late 1960s, leaving it to slower freight trains that ran less frequently. When Brightline’s parent company, Florida East Coast Industries, was taken over by the private-equity firm Fortress Investment Group, it built a second track so that passenger trains and freight trains could efficiently share the space. (Then it sold the freight rights to a Mexican conglomerate for $2.1 billion.) Since 2017, far more trains than ever before have run through these areas, and faster, in both directions at the same time.

Aleksey Kondratyev for The Atlantic
Left: Railway signals along the Brightline tracks in Hollywood, Florida. Right: The Brightline heads south to Miami from Fort Lauderdale.

As a result, once-familiar environments have been transformed. Take, for example, the story of Joann DePina, a 49-year-old mother of two who was killed by a Brightline train in January. DePina was walking over the tracks that cut through her neighborhood, but she was doing so on a well-worn footpath. She was technically trespassing, but there weren’t any fences or no trespassing signs, and it was a logical thing to do. DePina rented a room in a sober-living house on one side of the tracks and was crossing to get to a group meeting on the other side. She had been in recovery since 2017 and was saving money to move into her own apartment. 

I walked along the tracks with her aunt Maria Furtado in May. Furtado showed me the footpath, next to the white cross she’d put up in her niece’s memory. In person, it was clear why people would walk there: The tracks split the neighborhood in half, with tightly packed houses on one side and a row of businesses on the other. To get around the tracks legally would require walking down to an intersection to cross, then walking back, adding at least 10 minutes. Taking a shortcut over the tracks looks easy enough, and it was probably easy to do so safely during the decades when freight trains were the only traffic. Hence the worn path. 

“I worry about these people all the time,” Furtado told me, gesturing at a house whose yard ended less than 50 feet from the tracks. On a previous visit, she’d seen a young boy chasing after a cat as it walked on the tracks. As we talked, Furtado pointed behind me. I turned around and saw a Brightline train coming toward us—only a few seconds away, at most. The train whipped past—it’s powered by quiet diesel-electric locomotives and goes 79 miles per hour through that part of its route. It was easy to put myself in DePina’s place. She was walking at night, and she didn’t hear or see anything coming. Her timing was horrible.

After DePina’s death, Furtado attempted to contact Brightline but never heard back. She also contacted Governor Ron DeSantis, who forwarded her letter to the Florida Department of Transportation, which gave her a polite but vague response about its commitment to safety. (During the course of my conversations with Brightline about its record, Blasewitz provided a list of safety improvements that had been made to the tracks both before and after the train started operating, which cost nearly $500 million. “Brightline is one of the safest forms of transportation in the state of Florida, moving millions of people out of their cars and off dangerous roadways,” she wrote by email.) 

Furtado told me she wasn’t sure what other options were left to her. “I don’t know who to blame,” she said. In her opinion, someone should have to put up a fence along parts of the tracks that cut through neighborhoods—whether that’s the city or the state or Brightline, she doesn’t much care. Being from Massachusetts and having some familiarity with northern commuter trains, she also liked the idea of the tracks being elevated, even a little bit, to deter people from walking over them. “She wasn’t going to hike a mountain or climb over a fence to get across,” she said of her niece. 

DePina’s story is elucidating, but it’s only one incident. The NTSB has been conducting a series of investigations into Brightline accidents to search for patterns and will eventually publish a summary analysis of those findings. But so far, only a handful of reports have been published, and they offer few clear takeaways. 

For instance, last year, investigators looked into a pair of fatal accidents that had happened two days apart at the same intersection in Melbourne, Florida, a small, coastal city 70 miles southeast of Orlando. Both involved drivers going around safety gates. The details of the first crash were especially odd. The crossing’s gates and all of its other safety devices had been working perfectly. Neither the engineer nor the conductor of the train had done anything wrong, while the driver of the car did at least two obvious things wrong. The first was that he had driven around a stopped car and then the lowered gate even as a woman in the back seat of his car yelled at him not to. The second, a toxicology report showed, was that he had been on bath salts. 

On the one hand, the issue here was obvious: Florida Man. On the other, the NTSB’s report contains information that suggests a dangerous environment, regardless of one’s drug intake. It noted that Brightline service had dramatically increased train traffic through Melbourne in recent years. The double-tracking of the line at this location had been completed in June 2023; previously, 14 freight trains passed through each day, and now there were 14 freight trains plus 32 higher-speed passenger trains. Before the two back-to-back Brightline incidents, there had been only three crashes since 1975.

As part of that investigation, NTSB staffers rode the Brightline one Sunday from Orlando to West Palm Beach and back. They found all crossing gates and warning lights to be functioning perfectly and the train crews to be professional and alert. Yet the train they rode had to make an emergency stop to avoid hitting a pedestrian in Melbourne. Then it nearly hit a bicyclist, also in Melbourne. “While talking with the engineer,” the investigators noted in their write-up, “he stated that he had been involved in seven incidents while working for Brightline involving striking trespassers or vehicle strikes.”  

Aleksey Kondratyev for The Atlantic
The Brightline’s track intersects flatly, or “at grade,” with the roads on much of its route, cutting through the landscape at strange angles and in unexpected places.

Many train tracks are elevated to cross above roadways. Others are sunken down to cross beneath them. But the Brightline’s track intersects flatly, or “at grade,” with the roads on much of its route, including the part that runs through central Miami. 

Many states have undertaken grade-crossing-elimination projects over the past half century because they make train routes dramatically safer. On the Amtrak route between Washington, D.C., and New York City, the highest-trafficked stretch of train track in the country, there are no grade crossings. The last one was eliminated in the 1980s. 

There are 331 grade crossings along the Brightline route in South Florida. James Perkins, a former Brightline conductor, cited this when explaining to me why he no longer works for the company. He mostly enjoyed his time at Brightline, he said—the company was a good employer—but he didn’t want to work on that route anymore in large part because of how often the train would hit people. At his previous job operating a freight train in the 200-mile stretch between Pittsburgh and Harrisburg, he said there were 40 to 50 grade crossings. In the 65 miles between West Palm Beach and Miami, there are 174. “It’s just real busy,” he told me. “The fatalities—this was just something I didn’t want to continue doing.” 

When I visited the West Palm Beach area to look at the crossings and roads in person, I drove over the tracks dozens of times. They cut through the landscape at strange angles and in unexpected places—behind the downtown courthouse, alongside a Little League field in Delray Beach. People have been struck and killed by Brightline trains at both of these locations.

During my trip, I met with Eric Dumbaugh, a professor of urban and regional planning at Florida Atlantic University who has lived in the area for most of his life. “Brightline is unique nationally,” he said. “It’s operating right through the urban fabric.” Just by leaving their houses, people encounter it, whether they want to or not, and they sometimes have to react quickly, in a life-and-death situation, to a system they don’t intuitively understand. “This is why we see the issues that we have,” he said. 

To visualize this, we drove to a grade crossing in Delray Beach, where an elderly couple had been hit and killed by a Brightline train in 2023. The NTSB investigated this accident, perhaps because it was so confounding. The couple had been driving down a road adjacent to the tracks just after 8 p.m. It was winter, so it was dark. The husband was behind the wheel—he had a green light, so he turned right, at which point there was only a short bit of roadway before the couple found themselves on top of the southbound track. They either didn’t register or didn’t have time to react to the gate’s warning lights and bells. Their timing, like Joann DePina’s, was horrible, and the gates came down while the car was in the crossing. 

The couple apparently watched, unpanicked, as a northbound freight train approached from one direction. A witness told the NTSB that she saw the wife get out of the car, look around, then go over to the driver’s-side window to say something to her husband before getting back in the car. The woman had seemed calm. The best guess that Dumbaugh came to—the same as the NTSB’s—was that the wife had examined the car’s position and seen that it was clear of the track on which the freight train was approaching. She couldn’t see a train coming on the other track, from the other direction. The couple must have decided to wait for the freight train to pass. They turned off the engine of their car, as well as their headlights.

Just as the freight train passed, the Brightline came on the other track. It hit the front of the car and sent it spinning off the road, flipping onto its side. The wife was thrown out of the vehicle, while the husband was stuck inside. Both were dead at the scene. The witness pulled her own car onto the grass and sat for 10 or 15 minutes, shaking, she told the NTSB. She hadn’t seen the Brightline coming either.

Aleksey Kondratyev for The Atlantic
The Brightline heads south through Third Street and Dixie Highway in Pompano Beach.

Dumbaugh explored the intersection, pointing at various elements. Signage on the adjacent road made it clear that a train passes nearby, but didn’t tell drivers to be wary of turning into its path. “There was nothing on the approach that warned people a right turn would be an issue,” he said. From the NTSB report, we knew that the freight train had radioed the Brightline once it saw the car on the tracks and that the Brightline engineer had implemented the train’s emergency brakes, but there hadn’t been nearly enough time to stop. Again, it was a story without one easily identified insight. The Federal Railroad Administration regulates the operation of the gate. The road the couple had turned off was a state highway. The intersecting street was the responsibility of the city, but the traffic signals were the responsibility of the county. 

Brightline says that it is an advocate for closing certain crossings on its route, but that this rarely happens “without local support.” Because of all the elements at any intersection, the process of closing even one crossing can be convoluted and expensive. Sealing off the entire Brightline route or elevating the entire track would simply not be economically feasible for a private company. 

Still, over a period of months, I spoke with several experts who had different opinions on many of the technical details but who all agreed that there’s no real mystery behind the Brightline deaths. “Fast trains and grade crossings are always a deadly combination,” the historian Richard White, whose 2011 book about American railroads was a Pulitzer Prize finalist, told me. He put it the most succinctly, but I did not talk with anybody who disagreed with that conclusion.

While I was in Florida, I hoped to hear directly from Brightline executives. The company was co-hosting a conference called the Railway Interior Innovation Summit, in Orlando. So, of course, I took a Brightline train to get there.

The train ride was unlike any I’ve taken in my life. The Brightline’s passenger cars are softly lit with pretty blue LEDs along the ceiling, and the roomy seats are upholstered with soft white leather. There is ample legroom and nothing is broken. The elegant new stations have cocktail bars named Mary Mary, apparently in reference to Henry Flagler’s first and third wives, who had the same first name. The stations also have gift shops, where you can buy attractive Brightline merchandise—pink ball caps, soft sweatshirts, a candle matching the custom scent that is piped into the terminals. 

I bought a “Premium” (first-class) ticket from West Palm Beach for $99, which came with a steak sandwich on a brioche bun for dinner, a passion-fruit tartlet for dessert, a dark-chocolate Lindt truffle for a second dessert, and a glass of cuveé from the complimentary-drink menu. The Brightline is the first train line to offer basically flawless Wi-Fi provided by Elon Musk’s Starlink, which is why I got to see Brett Baty put the Mets up over the Red Sox while hurtling up the coast at the end of a long day. The ride was smooth and quiet and we were exactly on time. We made it to Orlando without incident in two hours and 12 minutes—more than an hour faster than the typical Amtrak on this route, and much less stressful than driving a car. 

Aleksey Kondratyev for The Atlantic
The Brightline’s passenger cars are lit with blue LEDs along the ceiling, and the seats are upholstered with white leather.

This probably would not have seemed remarkable to the rail summit’s many European attendees, whose countries already have high-functioning train systems. Many of these people were in the United States for the first time—meaning that their first experience of our wonderful and interesting country was three days in Orlando. At a networking event, I entered a cluster of conversation just as a Swiss man was explaining that American train stations are surrounded by “car parks,” which he found shocking, because most people in Switzerland ride their bikes to the train stations. (Switzerland is about half the size of Maine, by the way.)

A packed conference room listened to a panel on train start-ups, including one called Dreamstar Lines, which intends to begin operating a “hotel on rails”—a luxury overnight train between San Francisco and Los Angeles—before the 2028 Summer Olympics (in a mock-up, it had an on-board spa). Various companies showed concepts for spectacular and futuristic train cars, but Brightline was the center of attention. Its executives gave the most well-attended talks, got the biggest laughs. Everybody agreed that Brightline’s trains were impressive and that its proposals were exciting. 

On the third day of the summit, participants were led on a tour of Brightline’s Orlando maintenance facility by Tom Rutkowski, the company’s vice president and chief mechanical officer, a former general superintendent for New Jersey Transit, and a charming, brassy host. When we all boarded one of the trains to look around, Rutkowski encouraged us to sit down and feel the leather, which he said was the same that is used in Bentleys. “If you’ve never sat in a Bentley, this is as close as you’re going to get,” he told us.

Aleksey Kondratyev for The Atlantic
The interior of a Brightline train as it heads south to Miami from Fort Lauderdale

After the formal tour, the group was offered complimentary wraps for lunch in a meeting room. When I walked in, Rutkowski was sitting on top of a table, holding court in front of a small group of men who were standing around asking him friendly questions about Brightline’s business. “We are poor,” he told them. “I’m lucky I can make payroll.” He said it not as if the company were desperate but as if it were scrappy. He added, “There’s no government money coming to bail us out.” (Rutkowski later denied making these comments, and called them “nonsense.”)

Some additional context is needed here. The claim that there is no public money coming to or already in use by Brightline is not exactly true: The Florida line was built, in part, with $2.2 billion of tax-exempt bonds. If Brightline were, for some reason, to go bankrupt, it might behoove either Florida or the federal government to bail it out and take over operation of the line, rather than leaving everything to rust and the hundreds of thousands of people who use the train to go back to their cars. 

The bonds underlying Brightline have been downgraded multiple times this year because of slower-than-expected ridership growth and higher-than-expected costs. In July, the company announced its intention to defer $1.5 billion in interest payments, and NPR reported that Brightline had been looking for outside investors for months with little success. Blasewitz, the media-relations director, told me that Brightline is still confident in its year-over-year growth and that it intends to establish itself as an “integral” part of Florida’s transportation system, though she declined to comment on when the company expects to become profitable. 

In addition to the safety conversation, then, there is a conversation to be had about whether Brightline is even a private solution to a public problem at all. The new line in California, Brightline West, will be privately operated, but is being built with billions in federal grants. To the extent that I heard any muttering at the summit that was less than complimentary to Brightline, it was on this point. 

At one summit event, I chatted briefly with Jim Mathews, the president and CEO of the nonprofit Rail Passengers Association, who thought the Brightline project was interesting and in some ways laudable. Still, he said that Brightline’s Florida strategy was not repeatable. It had been a quirk of history that its parent company owned the right-of-way on those old railroad tracks, and it would not be in that situation again anywhere else in the country. Plus, Brightline lost more than $500 million in 2024 while serving only six stops, he pointed out. Amtrak, often regarded as an albatross around taxpayers’ necks, lost more—about $705 million—but serves more than 500 stops, including many that a private enterprise would never bother with and that a public one is obligated to serve. 

“The idea of scaling on a private level is just complete insanity,” Mathews told me when we talked again after the summit. “Brightline got 3 billion federal dollars to bring along Brightline West—which is great; I don’t oppose that. The more the merrier—the more service we have, the better it is,” he said. “But let’s not pretend this is the kind of capital investment that private industry can do by itself. They can’t.”

Aleksey Kondratyev for The Atlantic
“Fast trains and grade crossings are always a deadly combination,” says the historian Richard White.

If the most obvious question to ask about Brightline is Why are so many people dying on this one stretch of train track in Florida?, the second-most-obvious is Who can fix it? 

It seemed to me that the problem in Florida was being treated as unsolvable, as though this is somehow just the way it is. The Federal Railroad Administration, for instance, doesn’t believe that Brightline is at fault for the frequent accidents. James Payne, the FRA’s staff director of grade crossing and trespasser outreach, told me frankly that South Florida is a mess. “It keeps me up at night,” he said. But in his opinion, Brightline is doing about as much as it possibly can to improve grade crossings and encourage safety, given the constraints of its business and the existing infrastructure.

I talked with Jim Mathews about the situation at some length, hoping for clarity. Mathews didn’t have a perfect explanation either. He thought Brightline had been arrogant and callous, but he also thought the real issue was bigger. Americans are okay with tens of billions of tax dollars funding highways and airports overseen by powerful regulatory agencies. But we don’t want to spend the same way on trains, even though we want trains to be built. “We love private industry because it doesn’t cost us money, but we point fingers at private industry when it kills people,” he said. “That’s why we have governments—they protect people; they step in where markets fail.” Or they should. 

Just after the Miami Herald’s July story on Brightline deaths came out, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy remarked that there had been “way too many deaths” in Florida, and that something should be done. Shortly after that, federal grants worth more than $42 million, which were awarded to Brightline between 2022 and 2024 but had not been dispersed, were finally ushered along by Duffy. Those funds will be used to make some safety improvements, including fencing along parts of the Brightline’s route and various interventions to deter people from driving around lowered gates. At the same time, the proposed 2026 Department of Transportation budget that was advanced by Congress over the summer includes no funding at all for the Federal Railroad Administration’s Crossing Elimination Grant Program, which is the primary means by which local governments all over the country have funded grade-crossing-removal projects. 

In May, when I rode a Brightline train out of Miami, looking through the window at a ludicrously flat landscape, I thought about the future. The train hurtled through towns that were arranged on either side, going so fast while so close to houses, restaurants, parks, and people that I was startled again each time I looked out the window. This is not what it will be like when people ride Brightline West. That train will go through the desert and run mostly within an existing highway median. It won’t have the same pitfalls as this first experiment, for which people are dying and that’s just the cost of something new. 

Later that evening, I scrolled on my phone and came across an Instagram post about another Brightline accident, with a caption describing the person who had reportedly been hit as a “track snack.” People in the comments responded jubilantly, praising the train for chowing down on another soul. The beast was getting stronger, the commenters said with satisfaction. “As always sorry if this was your family member,” the account runner wrote dutifully in the replies.

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