Killer Train
November 11, 2025 at 07:30PMBrightline, which runs along the eastern edge of Florida, from Orlando to Miami, is the first private railroad in the United States. It is also the country’s deadliest rail line. Over seven years of operation, Brightline trains have killed 182 people. The accidents are gruesome and in many cases preventable—lax planning and corporate resistance to safety measures have meant that, on average, Brightline kills one person every 13 days. Among them is Randy Johanson, a deaf man who was walking home from a Winn-Dixie near Vero Beach:
Johanson’s brother, Daniel, a retired Lockheed Martin engineer, choked up during an interview at his Melbourne home in March as he cut into a sealed brown envelope marked as biohazard. He had been holding onto it for a year, avoiding it. He used the scissors as tongs, pulling out his brother’s blood-spattered ID cards and wallet. Remembering how the train “decimated” his brother’s body, he said he just doesn’t understand.
“My thought, being an engineer,” he said, “is that you pre-plan your projects, and you consider all those safety issues … before you start running a train at 110 miles an hour through small towns where people aren’t even aware of what’s going on.”
from Longreads https://longreads.com/2025/11/11/killer-train/
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