The New American Railroad

Floridian Continuity

“Railroads have played a vital role in the development of the American economy. They have made it possible to transport goods and people quickly and efficiently across vast distances, and have created new opportunities for commerce and trade.”

Charles Francis Adams Jr.¹

This quote from the son of an American first family shows it age. Railroads are a near mythic part of American industrial development, of manifest destiny, since the Golden Spike nailed the western frontier to the eastern republic.

But when I survey the America we live in, railroads are something of an afterthought. In the less settled parts of America, they still play an important role as material transports, but even here they are a shadow of what they once represented. In 1890 a twelfth of Americans were employed by railroads, and that number has fallen off a cliff. Why is this? I’m not entirely sure. Traditional American industry has certainly waned, hardly an original observation. The past of American railroads is not exactly my aim here. It is their future that concerns me, and that points inexorably to the rising state of Florida.

Railroads defined the Florida that existed outside of a tiny strip of Virginian, old south transplants from before the Civil War. When Henry Flagler, who had previously stood as John D. Rockefeller’s top guy, realized he was being eased out of that role, he cast his eye towards the relatively undeveloped peninsula of this curious state, and set about making a veritable empire. His rails snaked up and down the Atlantic Coast, joined by his majestic hotels. Flagler’s Florida was not a swamp filled backwater, but a fresh new place for the well to do to experience colonial excellence.

This brings us to the modern day. Years of speculation and proposals about high speed or light rail attempts in the United States have floated in the ether since I’ve been around, but Florida stands as the first flesh and blood attempt at it — the Brightline.

The Brightline is a light rail that currently runs from West Palm Beach to Miami, but it is a mere month from opening service all the way to Orlando. Public transit is hardly a strong interest of mine, but it cannot be denied this is an impressively ambitious project.

Behind it is Montana-born cofounder of Fortress Investments Group, Wes Edens. Edens, and what he represents, are really the key to the Railroad’s apparent success. Public transit in America carries the marks of government bureaucracy — ugly, sketchy, and only for people who are too poor to get around some other way. Brightline is the opposite — sleek, modern, and bearing the unmistakable look of minimalist luxury. A very witty tweet hits the nail on the head.

“Based billionaire trains ONLY - no third world violent trains that smell please”²

What the Brightline represents is a second, Flagler-like push in the development of Florida. And as with Flagler, it is based on an appeal to a certain type of person, with a certain level of means, that Florida relies on attracting in order to survive.

It’s a fairly benign observation, but Railroads serve to connect us, and the reason for this particular connection is in and of itself intriguing. Since the Covid lockdowns, Miami has received incredible amounts of money flowing out of professionals from California and New York who caught an altogether different virus, this one dating back to Flagler himself. And the nominally child-centered theme parks and rapacious central Florida real estate developers want in. Florida’s blitz of the last half decade, with Brightline as its keystone, is centered totally on drawing middle class and professional capital into itself to fuel rapid expansion. A certain degree of skepticism about the project’s goal and success haunts me, yet this bold, ambitious strike forward commands attention.

But Florida circa 1924 is really quite a different animal than Florida circa 2023. At the time the state was a novelty, albeit a luxury and interesting novelty, but a novelty all the same. In the words of Joel Stein of the Financial Times, “now Miami is the most important city in America.”³ And what the Brightline is really doing is forging the more populated, spacious, central sprawl of the state into this flashy, new metropolis. The fate of Florida will now be tied even more closely to Miami. Readers may recall my working theory of San Francisco vs. New York, and Miami serves as a sort of demonstration of this thesis.⁴ Stein helpfully informs us “And while many are coming (to Miami) from California, most are New Yorkers.”⁵ This doesn't mean there's no competition, as the erstwhile FTX arena demonstrates.

Taking at face value the Financial Times’ assertion that Miami is the future of America, that future is far from dour. Keith Rabois, speaking of his experience moving there from California, stated:

“It was incredibly refreshing to live in an area where the goal is to emulate people who are successful. It felt like moving to Mars”⁶

Miami’s current trajectory, wild and erratic though it is, demonstrates a reasonable belief that a sort of meritocracy remains, for now at least, embedded in the soul of Ameirca. This is the daring hope that the Brightline project carries with it, that intelligence and quality can triumph over the grey morass of mediocre equity.

1. Adams, Charles Francis. Railroads: Their Origins and Problems. United States: Putnam, 1878.

2. Maxwell Meyer, Twitter, April 24th, 2023, 8:39PM,

https://twitter.com/mualphaxi/status/165066082719044403

3. Stein, J. (2022) How Miami became the most important city in America, Financial Times. Financial Times. Available at: https://www.ft.com/content/77ee0d8d-bf74-4cc3-bde0-a064ce074726 (Accessed: April 28, 2023).

4. Gotham and the Golden City

5. Stein, Ibid

6. Stein, Ibid