Brightline conjures the glory of Florida East Coast passenger trains

When I fell into the mileage hobby more than 35 years ago, I was late to the game but ambitious to mark up as much of my Rand McNally Handy Railroad Atlas as possible. This was around 1987, when my boss, J. David Ingles, inspired me to keep track of everything I rode, something I could kickstart because of choice assignments I was racking up as a new Trains staffer. Compared to J.D.I. and his fellow mileage collectors, I was destined to be a piker. Nevertheless, I decided to give it a go.

There was one railroad I figured I’d never ride, not in a million years: Florida East Coast. In those days, FEC was deep into its role as a no-frills, no-nonsense freight-only moneymaker. After surviving bankruptcy, the occasional hurricane, and most of all a brutal and epochal strike, the FEC became a harbinger for the industry. So much of what it did in those years pointed to the future: caboose-less trains, two-man crews, disciplined scheduling, and conversion of its vaunted double-track mainline into a single-track raceway bristling with CTC-controlled sidings. Passenger trains quickly became anathema.

If fact, the last true FEC passenger train ran on July 31, 1968, a three-car local. By that time, the other varnish of FEC’s storied past had moved over to longtime competitor Seaboard Coast Line’s parallel route, partly to avoid the risk of running on a strike-bound railroad. Thus was the intrastate FEC — relatively independent of ICC oversight — free to become the lean operation it was meant to be.

As Trains’ David P. Morgan put it in a memorable profile in February 1975, “There are two Florida East Coast Railways, one for the romantic and one for the realist. The old FEC appeals to the heart; the new FEC appeals to the head.” The one that appealed to the head wouldn’t be one to run excursions, making FEC’s mileage a distant dream.

I thought about all this stuff a few weeks ago when, almost miraculously it seemed, I watched Florida’s sun-splashed real estate go blurring past through the generous window of a passenger train. A passenger train! I was pinching myself.

The view out the window was courtesy, of course, of Brightline, the still-new privately owned network of high-speed trains serving the Miami-West Palm Beach-Orlando corridor. We were riding a midday train to and from Orlando as part of the annual meeting of the Lexington Group in Transportation History in West Palm. The trip included approximately 35 miles of recently opened track at the northern end of the system, where the trains parallel Florida Highway 528, running on a new east-west right-of-way at 125 mph — old hat to Europeans but still amazing on this continent.

But most of our ride — about 200 miles out of a total of 235 — was on the FEC (I also got in a West Palm-Miami round trip the morning after the conference). I’m inclined to see just about every train trip I take through the lens of history, in this case contrasting Brightline with the once-upon-a-time FEC, jewel of the Flagler System, host of the Florida Special (“The Aristocrat of Winter Trains”), owner of that boondoggle known as the Key West extension (destroyed in the 1935 hurricane), and generally credited with making possible the conversion of coastal Florida from a malarial swamp into a glittering civilization.

Is FEC founder Henry Flagler’s place in Florida history overstated? Not if you ask Lucius Beebe. “(Flagler) was able before his death to claim Florida almost in its geographical, economic, and social entirety as his own creation,” wrote the author, never one to understate. “Call it enterprise or call it megalomania, no Roman proconsul or magnifico of medieval Italy ever brought into being so grandiose a concept as railroading and its incidental and collateral expansion in Flagler’s Florida.” Classic Beebe.

Brightline inherits a rarefied tradition. In the decades before the advent of 1963 austerity, the Florida East Coast was one of America’s premier hosts of passenger trains, most of them the result of partner railroads that funneled sun-bound varnish through Jacksonville. The aptly named Dixie Flagler got to the FEC via Chicago & Eastern Illinois, Louisville & Nashville, and Atlantic Coast Line. The Southern got in the act with the Royal Palm. The Pennsylvania, Louisville & Nashville, and ACL combined on the South Wind. Illinois Central sent its Seminole and City of Miami. The most prominent FEC pool partner was ACL, with its Miamian, Palmetto, Havana Special, and various Champions.

It was a dizzying lineup. You’d be hard pressed to say that witnessing a succession of New York Central trains split the night in Sandusky or Pennsy trains do the same at Altoona was any more exciting than what you’d see every day along the FEC at St. Augustine or Fort Pierce.

Morgan found it romantic. “Train watchers recall the Flagler System as a nocturnal railroad,” he wrote. “Trains seldom disturbed the heat rising above its 112-pound rails or actuated its color block signals during the day; night was when graceful 4-8-2s parted the balmy breezes as the engines stroked through the moonlight with Havana Specials and citrus blocks.”

Brightline isn’t the old FEC by a long shot. Nothing can replace the gleaming silver streamliners and red-and-yellow E units of the postwar era. But judged on its own terms, Brightline is equally exciting, especially when you gaze out the window at 110 mph and watch palm trees, sparkling ocean inlets, and sun-bleached resorts go past in a blur, a view as old as Flagler’s original vision. Brightline is a worthy successor to “The Seagoing Railroad” — one I was especially pleased to add to my Rand McNally atlas.