Could anyone (
@F-Line to Dudley ) give a very quick rundown (or direct me to a post where this has been discussed) as to why the Brightline project in Florida seems to be proceeding so much more smoothly than, well, anything we do up here?
Terrain? Density? Regulations? Privately run? All four? If so, which are the most important?
All of the above...but mainly because the private entity is Florida East Coast Railway, the largest Class II freight carrier in North America. Class I's being the continental big boys like CSX and Norfolk Southern in our neck of the woods and Union Pacific out west; Class II's being regional biggies like Pan Am. FEC is such a
BIG Class II that it nearly does the revenue of a Class I carrier despite having a network size similar to our not-so-lovable losers PAR. FEC thus started out with supremely well-maintained mainline track just begging for a major passenger investment...just about the best in the country. Best-maintained bridges/track to handle their primary profit center of transporting mined Florida limestone rock, invested in the intermodal rail-to-truck revolution way earlier than their peers, ran uniformly beefy power so they could move at Class 4 (60 MPH freight/80 MPH pax) track speeds up the flat grades of the Florida coast with fewer lashed-up locomotives than any of their peers, were the first U.S. installer of Positive Train Control 30 years ago, and pioneered what's called "precision scheduling" where train meets were immaculately well-timed for stretching crews longer-distance on shifts (a somewhat controversial innovation all the Class I's are reorganizing themselves to drink like kool-aid now). Basically, it's the type of supremely well vertically-integrated operation that old-timey private RR's ran so freight profits could pay for public-serving passenger service...but on a RR that
didn't financially collapse after WW2 like all the Northeastern Class I's did. Indeed, FEC kept up its local passenger service until 1968...later than most non-NEC member roads...and only ditched when Federal regulators relented on letting everybody trim those loss-leader services
without there being a bankruptcy prerequisite like Penn Central up north.
This made the FEC a very easy and ripe target for passenger re-investment, since their physical plant never decayed to the same degree the Northeastern RR's did. So the services currently traced out by Brightline has been a political football in Florida ever since the mid-1980's with the state trying (and mostly failing) to get something done and undertaking umpteen studies. Swingy Florida electoral politics simply never gave anything enough breathing room to take foot, despite several instances where public investment got close to biting. Where the notion of privatizing came in is after the FEC sold itself to Fortress Investments, a major hedge fund, in 2007. FEC had buckets of profits they weren't spending because state-of-repair really wasn't an issue for them, but they liked the margins they were racking up as a Class II too much to go real big and start playing merger/acquisition games with Class I carriers (back when merger mania was running hot amongst Class I's 20 years ago during CSX's & Norfolk Southern's joint buy/dismemberment of Conrail, BNSF's merging of Burlington Northern and Atchinson Topeka & Santa Fe, and Union Pacific's swallow of Southern Pacific). The activist hedge funds got involved with them because in market psychology sitting on too-large piles of cash without doing anything with it is considered a bad thing. So Fortress bought in, did some realigning with its other rail holdings to rebalance its portfolio...and then started wooing the private pax outfit
All Aboard Florida to plan out what would become the Brightline network. Since the mainline was in such superb shape and the freight meets were already immaculately-timed in each direction, it wouldn't take a huge investment to get passenger service up and running. They could upgrade their existing Class 4 (80 MPH) track to Class 5 (90 MPH) & Class 6 (110 MPH) without it being killer, and really only need to add as much double-tracking and crossovers as was needed solely by the passenger trains because freight meets were already so set-it-and-forget it. And eventually the A.A.F. coalition got enriched with the Virgin partnership to get them off to the races.
Today...Fortress managed to capitalize its portfolio on the burst of Brightline-related upgrade money to sell the FEC again, this time to the ginormous Grupo México RR/mining/construction conglomerate which owns Mexican Class I freight carrier Ferromex. The new owners are now seeking freight routing synergies across the Gulf between the FEC and already huge Ferromex network where it crosses the U.S. border in Texas, mainly for the Florida intermodal and limestone traffic that fits Grupo México's portfolio. But because the Fortress investors got a quick burst of freight upgrades for their passenger gamble and Brightline itself is well-invested from other sources, they weren't taking on the same liability as carrying a loss-leader passenger program fully on their own ledgers and were able to steam ahead thinking big.
Now...all of that worked out splendidly, but it was
extremely unique in time and place to the FEC and doesn't really have an analogue elsewhere in the country. The sprawly national Class I's simply aren't self-contained enough to run such tight ships in every facet on their mainlines as the FEC did, for one. It's not that CSX isn't as well-run up here...it's simply that their scope is so very very different having to run 100K miles of track from the Gulf to the Great Lakes, Mississippi to Atlantic Ocean that any niche routes with fully pre-tightened bolts are sitting and waiting. And the economics of passenger service are way different in most other parts of the country, weighting heavier to daily job-seeking commuter rail as first layer of service...intercity second. Florida having year-round tourism makes the higher profit-margin intercity service denser than an Amtrak Silver Service LD from Washington and sparser than a local commuter run easier to mount without dealing with decades worth of early losses in pursuit of building an audience. Tri-Rail (Miami, 1989) and SunRail (Orlando, 2014) are relatively recent-launch commuter rail services still very limited in scope, growing but not yet nearly as essential as their Northeastern counterparts.
So the timing was also very unique to post-2000 Florida and basically has no analogue elsewhere else in the country with exception of Vegas-L.A. where Virgin is now making hay accumulating funding & permits for Brightline West. So we're not exactly sitting at the tipping point of a new private passenger revolution, as basically the only two tourist-megaheavy corridors that suit that class of travel as first move have been spoken for and everywhere else it's either bootstrapping corridor routes on pretty well-developed local hubs (i.e. better job for Amtrak) or crying more for local-funded fast starts like Denver FasTraks. So it's not like there'll never be new private passenger services to tap. They're just very niche in place and time where they'll take off...and it took an awfully long time to even get that fit with Brightline since the first talk 35 years ago so isn't the sort of insta-proliferating prospect recent developments may make it superficially resemble.
