Florida's Brightline is one of the deadliest US railroads. Its top executive says drones could help change that
- Of the United States' 821 railroads, none see more fatalities on a per-mile basis than Brightline, the train between West Palm Beach and Miami, Florida.
- Patrick Goddard, the railroad's president, pushed back against some press coverage surrounding those incidents in an interview with Business Insider.
- He says the company is looking to technology like drones and infrared cameras to better spot intruders and reduce the number of collisions.
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Executives at Brightline, the private passenger rail service between West Palm Beach and Miami, Florida, are pushing back against findings that it's the deadliest of America's railroads by one measure.
In an interview with Business Insider, president Patrick Goddard said some press coverage of deadly incidents - and an Associated Press analysis of federal safety data showing Brightline leads the nation's 821 railroads in fatalities on a per-mile-traveled basis - hasn't always been fair.
"I have to be somewhat critical of some of the mainstream media who are using these headlines for clickbait," he said. "You know 'Brightline crashes into ___,' because we're not crashing into anybody. We have not had a single incident caused by our equipment, engineers, or operators."
Rather, most fatalities involving Brightline trains have either involved trespassers on the tracks or cars struck at grade crossings. Unlike true high-speed rail in most of the developed world, trains in the US largely cross roads "at grade" with flashing red lights and barrier arms that drop when a train is approaching.
Government data shows US railroads strike more than 800 people every year, or nearly 2.5 every day, with about 500 of those deaths ruled as suicides. Still, Brightline saw one death per 29,000 miles traveled, the AP found, versus an average of 100,000 miles for most other urban passenger railroads.
"Our grade crossings exceed the Federal Railroad Administration standards," Goddard said. "We made a $2 billion investment on the Miami to West Palm Beach corridor to improve the infrastructure and as part of those improvements we improved all the grade crossings."
Goddard also pointed to initiatives like a "buzz box" mobile barbershop to promote rail safety through a partnership with the education organization Operation Lifesaver. Other outreach, he said, included numerous public-safety announcements and in-school workshops.
Of course, trespassers are likely to always plague American railroads, just as they affect passenger services run by Amtrak and other operators throughout the country. Most of the time, when a train operator sees a person or object in its path, it's far too late to stop the train or slow it in a meaningful way. While reducing the number of trespassers is always an option, grade crossings are likely to remain, and are expensive to replace.
That's where new technology comes in.
"What we're doing differently this year, which we haven't really done before, is to start leaning on technology to figure out if we can predict these incidents ahead of time," Goddard said.
"We're looking at using infrared technology to detect intruders to the corridor who aren't supposed to be there," he said, adding that the tech should notify train engineers so they can act appropriately.
"We're looking at using drones to go and intercept people who aren't supposed to be on the corridor, and a number of other things that have actually never been done before in the rail industry," Goddard said.
Those innovations could be all the more important as Brightline lays tracks to Orlando, where it hopes to service passengers by 2022. By then, the company hopes train speeds could top 125 miles per hour through the less densely populated area, compared to today's top speed of 79 through heavily urbanized cities.
Wes Edens, the billionaire finance executive who owns the railroad, revealed those future plans and more in an interview with Business Insider last year.
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