Rail Inspectors To Examine Florida Crossings After Spike in Brightline Fatalities

After nine fatal collisions since early November, the Federal Railroad Administration plans to investigate the Brightline passenger train in Florida.

“We’re going to start with what we consider to be the most accident prone crossings and work our way back from that,” James Payne, the agency’s staff director of grade crossing, told the South Florida Sun Sentinel.

The agency said it will start inspecting grade crossings next month in the Fort Lauderdale, Tampa, Orlando and Jacksonville areas. Inspectors will be checking for equipment defects and safety devices that do not meet federal standards, then will inspect South Florida’s quiet zones, which forbid train engineers from sounding their locomotive’s horns at night in densely populated areas.

The focus will also be on whether communities are maintaining their safety obligations they agreed to with the FRA as a condition of having their areas designated as a quiet zone.

Brightline train has been called state-of-the-art passenger rail system, moving people across congested parts of Florida. But it also has seen an unusually high number of accidents, adding to Florida’s accident rate that is much higher than the national average, according to news reports.

Photo: Broward County Sheriff’s officials help remove passengers from a Brightline train after it struck a car at an intersection in Pompano Beach, Fla., in 2020. One person died. (Carline Jean/South Florida Sun-Sentinel via AP)

Topics Florida