In November 2017, I left my home in Boston and moved out of the United States.
The next month, a train called Brightline began running in Florida. According to this story, it causes many more fatalities than other trains, including other trains in Florida — over the last eight years, "at least 185 fatalities, 148 of which were believed not to be suicides," according to federal data. And it's a relatively small railroad that serves only six stops. The question is, What makes Brightline different?
A ‘Death Train’ Is Haunting South Florida: The Brightline has been hailed as the future of high-speed rail in the United States, but it has one big, unignorable problem. Written by Kaitlyn Tiffany, photographs and videos by Aleksey Kondratyev, The Atlantic, October 22, 2025
This passage in the middle of the story helps me understand what it looks like on the ground:
...once-familiar environments have been transformed. Take, for example, the story of Joann DePina, a 49-year-old mother of two who was killed by a Brightline train in January. DePina was walking over the tracks that cut through her neighborhood, but she was doing so on a well-worn footpath. She was technically trespassing, but there weren’t any fences or no trespassing signs, and it was a logical thing to do. DePina rented a room in a sober-living house on one side of the tracks and was crossing to get to a group meeting on the other side. She had been in recovery since 2017 and was saving money to move into her own apartment.
I walked along the tracks with her aunt Maria Furtado in May. Furtado showed me the footpath, next to the white cross she’d put up in her niece’s memory. In person, it was clear why people would walk there: The tracks split the neighborhood in half, with tightly packed houses on one side and a row of businesses on the other. To get around the tracks legally would require walking down to an intersection to cross, then walking back, adding at least 10 minutes. Taking a shortcut over the tracks looks easy enough, and it was probably easy to do so safely during the decades when freight trains were the only traffic. Hence the worn path.
... As we talked, Furtado pointed behind me. I turned around and saw a Brightline train coming toward us—only a few seconds away, at most. The train whipped past—it’s powered by quiet diesel-electric locomotives and goes 79 miles per hour through that part of its route. It was easy to put myself in DePina’s place. She was walking at night, and she didn’t hear or see anything coming. Her timing was horrible.
* * *
In her opinion, someone should have to put up a fence along parts of the tracks that cut through neighborhoods—whether that’s the city or the state or Brightline, she doesn’t much care. Being from Massachusetts and having some familiarity with northern commuter trains, she also liked the idea of the tracks being elevated, even a little bit, to deter people from walking over them.
Thinking about this today.
See: 1931 U.S. railroad deaths
I wrote a book about someone who died by suicide by train in 1940. It's called Ten Past Noon: Focus and Fate at Forty.
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