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Off the Rails

Brightline is drowning in debt, Tri-Rail is starved for funding, and the communities along Miami's FEC corridor are left waiting for a transit future that keeps getting derailed.

On the morning of May 13, Eric Alan Hirt — known across Miami's graffiti world as Eson — stepped onto the railroad tracks in Biscayne Park and never made it to the other side. The Brightline train that struck him was one of hundreds that barrel through the corridor each week, through the neighborhoods that line the Florida East Coast Railway: Biscayne Park, El Portal, Miami Shores, Little Haiti. Eson was among at least 194 people killed by Brightline trains since the service began operating in 2017 — a toll that keeps rising even as the company that runs those trains may be running out of time.

Brightline doesn't just have a safety problem. Despite receiving hundreds of millions of dollars in public subsidies, Brightline is a high-speed money pit. Saddled with $5.5 billion in debt, Brightline's operators have until June 15 to make an interest payment of $117 million or face bankruptcy.

Yet it isn't just Brightline's future is uncertain. Miami-Dade County's pending deal to sublease the FEC tracks from Brightline for the expansion of Tri-Rail into the Biscayne Corridor is also up in the air due due to state funding issues. Complicating things even further is a lawsuit from the actual owner of the FEC tracks, Florida East Coast Railway, which challenges Brightline's right to make a deal with Miami-Dade without its consent.

Miami-Dade County Commissioner Raquel Regalado, vice chair of the county's transportation committee and the South Florida Regional Transportation Authority (SFRTA), confirms that local officials are trying to work out a new agreement that may enable affordable Tri-Rail trains to travel between Miami and the Ojus area west of Aventura.

And key to that agreement is getting more funds from the state of Florida.

"The county doesn't have the funding to do it," Regalado said.

Two years ago, county officials, with the help of Brightline executives, were able to assemble $927 million in federal, state and local funding for the "Northeast Corridor." But that funding package was derailed after Florida legislators omitted $200 million in promised funding from the state budget last summer. Without that state money, the county can't access the $389 million grant the Federal Transit Agency earmarked for the Northeast Corridor project, since it's predicated on a matching state grant, Regalado said, and it's unlikely that the county will receive that $200 million anytime soon.

"When this was originally done it was raining money and that is not where we are now," Regalado said. "So, we are trying to reduce that price point and figure out how we can make it work."

Part of what was inflating the Northeast Corridor's price tag was Brightline's hopes of obtaining more than $330 million from Miami-Dade County in exchange for track access, according to a bond offering Brightline marketed in August 2024. That would be in addition to a similar deal that Brightline was negotiating with Broward County for a commuter train system that included stations in Hollywood, by Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport and near Broward Health Medical Center in Fort Lauderdale, the South Florida Business Journal reported.

However, Brightline's ability to sublease the FEC tracks to Miami-Dade or Broward is contested by their actual owner: Jacksonville-based freight train company Florida East Coast Railway (FECR).

Accused of unfair and deceptive acts

Last September, FECR filed an amended 60-page lawsuit that claimed Brightline and its owner, New York-based Fortress Investment Group, had no authority to negotiate rail access without its permission. Despite multiple cease-and-desist orders, Brightline executives continued to negotiate commuter rail deals with all three South Florida counties and told county officials they did not need FECR's permission to provide track access, according to the suit.

"Defendants [Brightline and Fortress] engaged in unfair and deceptive acts and practices in the conduct of their trade and commerce including … engaging in clandestine business dealings behind FECR's back to dramatically expand passenger railway traffic on the FEC Corridor without consulting FECR, the owner and primary user of the corridor," FECR's lawsuit, drafted by attorneys Juan Morillo and Jason Sternberg, stated.

Aside from being cheated out of revenue from the county, FECR asserted that "more than doubling the number of passenger trains operating over the FEC corridor" would create huge safety issues without making billions of dollars of additional capital investments.

FECR's suit also claimed that Brightline and Fortress engineered an "end around" to "extract public money, backstop bondholders, and shift costs and risks onto FECR, the county, and the public," and that Brightline owes millions of dollars in maintenance fees and other costs to FECR.

Brightline and Fortress Investment Group did not return inquiries for comment. However, in its motion for arbitration, Brightline accused FECR of "making gratuitous allegations it knew were both false and irrelevant." In November, Miami-Dade Circuit Court Judge Robert Watson granted a temporary stay pending arbitration.

Expansion, money losses and death

Back in 2007, Fortress Investment Group paid $3.7 billion for Florida East Coast Industries, a move that gave the investment management fund control of the very same rail corridor that Henry Flagler laid down in the late 19th century. Soon after, Fortress Investment set about splitting the train company into two companies. FECR would handle freight logistics and track maintenance. Florida East Coast Industries (FECI) would build a passenger train system, originally known as All Aboard Florida, connecting Miami to Orlando. FECI would also handle real estate development and transactions.

By 2017, Fortress sold FECR to Grupo Mexico for $2.1 billion, with the deal including exclusive passenger train rights for All Aboard Florida/Brightline. A year later, Brightline was operating at downtown area stations in Miami, Fort Lauderdale, and West Palm Beach.

After that, Brightline kept on expanding. By December 2022, Brightline opened its Aventura and Boca Raton stations. By September 2023, Brightline's station at Orlando International Airport opened. There are ongoing plans to build stations in Stuart and Cocoa, a rail extension between Tampa and Orlando, and a separate high-speed connection from Los Angeles to Las Vegas via a venture called Brightline West.

Brightline attracted plenty of ridership. In 2025, the train reported $214 million in sales, a 14 percent increase from the year before. Unfortunately, with expenses, the company still had an operational loss of $127 million, according to analysis by WLRN of Ernst & Young's Brightline audit. Brightline also accumulated loads of debt through a series of bond issues that include $2.2 billion in senior municipal bonds that investors would see just 44 cents on $1 repaid should the company go bankrupt, according to a report from CreditSights.

Brightline has already received $486 million in taxpayer support to build new train stations, bridges and safety features at railroad crossings, according to a joint investigation by WLRN and the Miami Herald. Among the investments documented in that report: Miami-Dade County's allocation of $72.7 million to build Aventura Station in Ojus, $4 million from the city of Aventura for a pedestrian bridge that would connect Aventura Station to Aventura Mall, about $70.3 million from various sources for a rail extension and a platform connecting Tri-Rail to Brightline's MiamiCentral station, $130.5 million from the U.S. Department of Transportation to replace the St. Lucie River rail bridge, and $27.3 million from the Federal Railroad Administration and the city of Boca Raton for the development of Brightline's Boca Raton Station.

The safety enhancements made at railroad crossings also didn't prevent 194 people from being struck and killed by Brightline trains between 2017 and 2025, another Miami Herald-WLRN investigation revealed. That figure doesn't include several people killed in the past month. Among them: Eric Alan Hirt, also known as Eson, a well-known graffiti artist struck by a Brightline train while crossing the tracks in Biscayne Park. Also killed were two people in a car that was struck by a train in West Palm Beach.

Tri-Rail financial woes and developer solutions

Unlike Brightline, Tri-Rail is run by a public agency, the SFRTA. And while it has been involved in talks to expand Tri-Rail to the FEC tracks, the SFRTA's staff is mainly worried about its continued operations along an 80-mile state-owned rail corridor west of I-95. That's because the state legislature slashed its annual funding from $42 million to just $15 million last year.

But this upcoming fiscal year, there's hope. The state legislature approved $60 million to support rail enterprise.

"Subject to FDOT confirmation, we believe that this legislation may give FDOT the discretion to use these monies for SFRTA's annual operations," SFRTA's interim executive director Diana Hernandez Del Calvo wrote in an email to Biscayne Times, referring to the Florida Department of Transportation. "This is a great first step, and SFRTA looks forward to continuing to work collaboratively with our funding partners to provide Tri-Rail service in the future."

As a more permanent solution, the SFRTA board has backed Regalado's proposal to sell advertising rights, concessions, and properties for development near Tri-Rail stations. The SFRTA has already inked a deal to lease more than 17 acres of land from the agency by Tri-Rail's Boca Raton station for a future 340-unit apartment complex that will be built by 13th Floor Investments and Boston-based Rockpoint. Regalado said her memorandum of understanding would enable the SFRTA to make similar deals with state-owned land.

"They can give us the land so we can create more revenue that can offset the expenses of the SFRTA," Regalado said.

Granting developers extra density in exchange for funding could also help fund the operation of a future Tri-Rail line along the FEC tracks, she added. Plus, builders will fight for the prospect of having a new station by their developments.

Ned Murray, associate director of the Jorge M. Perez Metropolitan Center at Florida International University, said for South Florida to continue to evolve in a place where roads and expressways are becoming more congested, "both Brightline and Tri-Rail need to remain in place."

"We need rail service, the question is how do we make that happen without federal or state subsidies given the current situation," Murray said. The answer: "We need the private sector to step up."

Regalado is confident that something will be done with what planners once called the Coastal Link – a term for Tri-Rail’s long-planned expansion to the FEC corridor.

As for Brightline, Regalado doesn't think its demise is inevitable.

"I can't speak for their business model, but they have been working on this for some time, and I don't think that everything goes away," she said.

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