The Brightline is a beautiful train. Ultra-quiet and decorated with streaks of highlighter yellow, it carries passengers between Miami and Orlando, sometimes moving as fast as 125 miles per hour. It restores glamour to the humble railroad: During your ride, if you wish, you can order a half bottle of Veuve Clicquot for $59; the on-board bathrooms are large and clean enough to take a decent mirror selfie in. Condé Nast Traveler has called it “super chic.”

Privately owned and operated and transporting about 250,000 passengers a month, the Brightline is only the second high-speed train in the United States and the first outside the Northeast Corridor, where Amtrak operates the Acela. Its newness and sleekness make it a novelty in a country where trains are mostly old and ugly. Its existence shows that America can still build great things and that private industry can build them quickly and with style. If a beautiful high-speed train can work in Florida—whose former governor famously rejected more than $2 billion in federal funding for such a train—maybe it can work anywhere. But right now, something is very wrong.

What the Brightline is best known for is not that it reflects the gleam of the future but the fact that it keeps hitting people. According to Federal Railroad Administration data, the Brightline has been involved in at least 185 fatalities, 148 of which were believed not to be suicides, since it began operating, in December 2017. Last year, the train hit and killed 41 people—none of whom, as best as authorities could determine, was attempting to harm themselves. By comparison, the Long Island Rail Road, the busiest commuter line in the country, hit and killed six people last year while running 947 trains a day. Brightline was running 32.

In January 2023, the National Transportation Safety Board found that the Brightline’s accident rate per million miles operated from 2018 to 2021 was more than double that of the next-highest—43.8 for the Brightline and 18.4 for the Metra commuter train in Chicago. This summer, the Miami Herald and a Florida NPR station published an investigation showing that someone is killed by the train, on average, once every 13 days.

Floridians have started calling it the “Death Train” and maintain a sense of gallows humor about it, saying that it must be “fed” regularly to keep hurricanes away. Train attendants told me that Brightline engineers and conductors sometimes darkly joke about earning a “golden ticket”—which is when the train hits someone at the right time so that the three paid days off a worker gets for emotional distress are rolled into a weekend that takes up most of the week.

Brightline argues that the “Death Train” moniker is unfair for many reasons. One is the notorious difficulty of determining whether a death on a train track was a suicide. The company says the true rate of suicides on its Florida route is higher than government agencies report because of the variability in how local law-enforcement agencies and medical examiners make their determinations. Although Brightline no longer insists, as it has in the past, that the majority of the deaths are the result of suicides or drugs, it still takes care to frame the issue as a matter of personal responsibility. None of the deaths on Brightline tracks has been the result of equipment failure or operator error, Ashley Blasewitz, Brightline’s director of media relations, wrote to me in an email. “All have been the result of illegal, deliberate and oftentimes reckless behavior by people putting themselves in harm’s way.”

Federal agencies have investigated the Brightline incidents and produced no firm conclusions about why they have happened so often. The company, sometimes called “Frightline” on the local news, has not been found responsible for any of the deaths. How could it be responsible for people driving around lowered gates or walking into the clearly delineated path of a train? Yet there must be some explanation for the unusual number of fatalities.

Brightline’s parent company aspires to create additional train routes all over the country. It has been embraced by pro-transit wonks and former President Joe Biden’s train-nerd transportation secretary, Pete Buttigieg, as well as by tech-world influencers and members of the Trump administration. In a February press release announcing that it would investigate a federally funded California high-speed-rail project that has become a decade-plus boondoggle, Donald Trump’s Departme