The Brightline Train Takes You to Florida’s “Most Exciting Destinations”—How to Book It
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There are so many ways you can travel around the country, whether you prefer the (relative) simplicity of a flight, or want to draw out your journey with a road trip . But don’t overlook trains, which offer some of the most stunning views and distinctive travel experiences you can find. If you’re planning to take a trip through Florida any time soon, you might want to consider using the Brightline train. Read on to learn everything you need to know about the first privately-owned passenger rail service in the U.S.
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What Is the Brightline Train?
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The Brightline train is Florida’s high-speed intercity ride that connects Orlando and Miami with intermediate stops in Aventura, Fort Lauderdale, Boca Raton, and West Palm Beach. It is the first “privately owned, operated and maintained passenger rail service” in the U.S., according to the real estate developer Florida East Coast Industries (FECI).
As described by Brightline, the train is “the forefront of elevated travel between South Florida and Orlando,” connecting you to the state’s “most exciting destinations.”
When Was the Brightline Train Introduced?
The development of the train started all the way back in March 2012 with All Aboard Florida, a subsidiary of FECI. In 2015, All Aboard Florida revealed that its upcoming rail line between Miami and Orlando would be known as Brightline, The Real Deal reported.
“With the introduction of Brightline, we set out to reinvent what traveling by train can mean in America, making it a forward-leaning solution that is a smarter alternative to more cars on crowded roads,” Michael Reininger , president of All Aboard Florida and CEO of Brightline, said in a statement at the time.
Brightline officially launched operations in 2018, with trains running between Miami, Fort Lauderdale, and West Palm Beach, according to a press release from the company. It then started construction on its 170-mile extension from West Palm Beach to Orlando in 2019, opening stations in Boca Raton and Aventura in 2022.
The full service of the Brightline train between Miami and Orlando finally launched on Sept. 22, 2023.
“This is a historic day for Brightline and the team that worked diligently over these past 10 years to bring the project to reality. We are charting a new path for innovation and transportation, and people are responding as we knew they would,” Reininger said in a statement regarding the opening on the Orlando station.
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How Fast Does the Brightline Train Go?
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The Brightline train takes approximately three hours to travel 235 miles between Miami and Florida. With passengers onboard, it can travel at a maximum speed of 125 miles per hours, or more than two miles per minute.
But during testing in March 2023 , Brightline officially became the fastest train in Florida and the Southeastern U.S. after reaching speeds of 130 miles per hour. (The company is required to test trains faster than planned operating speeds).
“Florida has always been at the forefront of train travel since the days when Henry Flagler connected Jacksonville to the Keys,” Jim Kovalsky , president of the Florida East Coast Railway Society, said in a statement at the time. “Back then, there were reports that trains ran at 100 mph, but no one ever dreamed of reaching 130 mph. Brightline dreamed big and did it. History has been made and Henry Flagler would be proud.”
How Much Did the Brightline Cost to Construct?
The extension of the Brightline train from Miami to Orlando was certainly not an inexpensive endeavor. The construction of the Orlando expansion project itself took fours years of construction, which “included 56 bridges, including 18 new bridges, three underpasses, drainage installations, track and signalization installation and 60 track miles of new rail.”
Overall, the project cost $6 billion, according to Brightline. But the company previously said it expects to transport 8 million people every year in Florida once fully operational.
“At those levels of ridership, we’re going to be a very profitable organization,” Reininger told CNBC in 2023.
How Many Jobs Did Brightline Create?
The construction of the Brightline train has “generated substantial economic benefits in Florida,” according to the company. In total, it was responsible for creating over 10,000 jobs and around $6.4 billion in direct economic impact to the state.
“Construction teams worked more than seven million hours over the course of four years to complete the project,” Brightline stated in a press release.
In addition, independent studies have also indicated that both the construction of this high-speed railway and the launch of service is expected to generate more than 2,000 permanent jobs as well.
“This system is expected to have a major impact on Florida’s travel and workforce industries while bringing a sustainable transportation alternative,” the company noted.
What Food Do They Serve on the Brightline?
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For many travelers, it’s important that they know what kind of food and drinks they’ll have access to during their trip. Those traveling on Brightline’s first-class fare, known as PREMIUM, will be able to enjoy complimentary food and drinks board and have access to a complimentary breakfast between Orlando and South Florida.
Meanwhile, guests traveling on Brightline’s cheaper, business-class fare, known as SMART, can “choose from a variety of food and drinks available for purchase.” Selections for drinks include spirits, mixers, cocktails, wine, beer, and seltzer, while snack options include various chips, candies, protein bars, pastries, parfaits, fruits, sandwiches, and salads. You can view the entire menu with prices on Brightline’s website .
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Brightline Train: Environmental Benefits
Brightline says that it’s committed to making a positive impact on the environment.
“We’re building easy, efficient, and eco-friendly routes between some of the country’s best cities,” the company states on its website . “With a focus on sustainability, it’s a safer, greener way to travel and protect the environment.”
Here are three environmental benefits that the Brightline train service has touted.
1. Lower emissions
Brightline is fighting climate change by working toward “operating completely carbon-free rides,” according to its website . The company’s train system is helping to reduce highway and city congestion by helping to remove three million cars from the roads each year. Its diesel-electric locomotives also run on clean biodiesel, which is set to further help lower CO2 emissions by an estimated 72,000 metric tons each year.
2. Greener alternatives
Brightline is committed to bringing sustainability to every step of its service, which includes greener alternatives at its train stations. Through a partnership with Florida Power & Light Company’s (FPL), the company is using clean energy at its station thanks to the installation of FPL’s SolarNow SolarTrees to both power and provide shade to the facilities. On top of that, Brightline has opened up electric vehicle charging spots at each of its stations with the help of FPL.
3. Ecological considerations
As part of its efforts for “reimagining a better future,” Brightline has considered its ecological impact as well. The company says it “conducts detailed environmental impact assessments and implements a number of mitigation strategies that help preserve the ecology and biodiversity of the areas” it serves.
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What Is Brightline West?
Brightline West
Brightline doesn’t just have its sights set on Florida. The company is looking to expand to the other side of the country with its Brightline West project . This train will run between Las Vegas and Southern California, and is set to become the “first true high-speed passenger rail system in the nation.”
Brightline West officially broke ground on the project in April 2024, according to a press release . The 218-mile system will be constructed in the middle of Interstate 15, taking passengers from Las Vegas to Rancho Cucamonga in just 2 hours and 10 minutes at speeds up to 200 miles per hour—which is “twice as fast as the normal drive time.”
It has also been “hailed as the greenest form of transportation in the world” due to plans for the system’s trains to be fully electric and run on zero emission.
“This is a historic project and a proud moment where we break ground on America’s first high-speed rail system and lay the foundation for a new industry,” Brightline founder Wes Edens said in a statement accompanying the April press release. “Today is long overdue, but the blueprint we’ve created with Brightline will allow us to repeat this model in other city pairs around the country.”
Wrapping Up
That’s it for our guide on the Brightline train to help you learn everything you need to know about this innovative Florida rail service. If you’re ready to hop onboard, you can buy a ticket on the website.
And be sure to check back with us soon for more travel insights that will help you discover all that the country has to offer!
30 Travel Movies to Help Inspire Your Next Trip
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One of the great things about movies is that they can take you places without you having to squeeze into an uncomfortable airplane seat or with all the other hassles that real-life travel entails. There are lots of great movies about people setting out to see the world , so let the big screen scratch your wanderlust by checking out these 31 films.
Some of the movies on this list are romantic, following two people as they come together in that special way that happens when you’re away from home. Others are about journeys of self-discovery, showing what can happen when you hit the road solo. Some movies are uproarious comedies that will transport you away from your troubles as you laugh along to the antics on screen. There are also movies that are less of a vacation than they are an adventure, sure to get your blood pumping. And there are some scary movies about travel—the sort that might make you think, “You know, actually, maybe let’s make this one a staycation.”
Don’t bother packing your bags. All you need to do is hit “play” to embark on any one of these 30 great travel movies.
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Romantic Travel Movies
Diane Lane stars in this charming 1996 movie as a recently divorced woman who travels to Italy in an attempt to break out of her post-divorce funk. (In her defense, her husband was cheating on her and he got to keep the house, so she’s right to be miffed.) Once in Tuscany, though, she somehow becomes the owner of a villa, and as she begins to make a new life for herself, the potential for new love emerges amidst some of the most beautiful scenery and delicious-looking wine ever put to film. It’s the type of movie that will have you looking up flights to Florence.
A destination wedding counts as travel, and the breakout comedy of 2023 was shot on location in Australia. Glenn Powell and Sydney Sweeney play two people who left on bad terms after a one-night stand only to have to make nice when their mutual friends get married. Anyone But You is enough to make you want to take a trip Down Under, although perhaps without all the rom-com shenanigans.
Kate Winslet and Cameron Diaz play lovelorn women who swap homes so that they can get away from their respective heartbreaks over Christmastime. When Winslet’s Iris and Diaz’s Amanda get to Los Angeles and London, respectively, they find new love in Jack Black and Jude Law’s characters. The 2006 movie, from the great Nancy Meyers , works extra well as a travel movie because, thanks to the house-swapping premise, it’s a reminder that everyone’s home is somebody else’s trip.
The first of Richard Linklater’s Before trilogy introduces audiences to Ethan Hawke’s Jesse and Julie Delpy’s Céline as they meet on a train from Budapest and decide to spend the night together wandering Vienna. Widely regarded as one of the more romantic movies ever made, Before Sunrise will also make you want to explore Vienna with someone you’ve just met—someone who maybe you could see yourself spending the rest of your life with.
Technically, Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris is a travel movie (because Owen Wilson’s character is visiting Paris with his fiancee, played by Rachel McAdams ) and a time travel movie (because he goes back in time to 1920s). It’s a romantic movie both because of the relationship Wilson’s Gil strikes up with Marion Cotillard’s Adriana and because of how it romanticizes Paris and nostalgia—and deftly interrogates that romanticism.
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Movies About Traveling Solo
Dev Patel stars in this 2016 film, which is based on the true story of Saroo Brierley , who was separated from his parents in India at a very young age and adopted by an Australian couple. Once he grew up, he went back to his birth country in an attempt to find his biological parents. Saroo’s trek through India and into his own forgotten past is a tear-jerking, emotional travel story, and Lion was rewarded with six Oscar nominations.
This 2014 adaptation of Cheryl Strayed’s memoir Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail stars Reese Witherspoon as Strayed sets out to hike from Southern California to Washington State in an attempt to find herself. The tour of the West Coast’s trails is a tour-de-force for the actor as her character remakes her life one hiking boot-clad step at a time.
In 1977, Robyn Davidson set out on a nine-month journey across the unforgiving Australian Outback with her dog and four camels. She later wrote about her adventure in National Geographic and in her memoir Tracks . In 2013, her story was adapted into a film with the same name. Mia Wasikowska plays Davidson in the movie, which features stunning cinematography of the Australian desert in all its harsh beauty.
A lot of solo travel stories are tales of self-discovery where the voyager has learned something by the time they reach their destination. Into the Wild offers no such catharsis, instead telling the true story of Christopher McCandless , a man who hiked across America and eventually ended up in the Alaskan wilderness—an environment he was not prepared for. It’s a poignant, tragic counterpart to the more common celebrations of wanderlust you tend to see in pop culture.
Julia Roberts stars as Elizabeth Gilbert in this 2010 adaptation of her memoir of post-divorce travel and self-discovery. Feeling her life is aimless and without purpose, Liz elects to travel around the world, stopping in Italy, India, and Bali where she eats, prays, and well, you can probably guess.
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Travel Horror Movies
Ari Aster’s supremely disturbing folk horror movie stars Florence Pugh as a young woman who is begrudgingly invited by her not-great boyfriend and his friends to go to Sweden to observe a commune’s midsummer festival. Upon getting there, Pugh’s Dani soon learns that the Hårga are not all sunshine and flowers, and that there are dark rituals and sinister plots. It’s the type of movie that will make you think twice about a Nordic vacation, and you’ll never look at a taxidermied bear the same way.
This 2005 horror movie, from director Eli Roth , is one of the biggest examples of the so-called “torture porn” subgenre, but there’s more to Hostel than just blood and guts. (There are a lot of blood and guts, though.) The film follows some American backpackers who, while traveling in Eastern Europe, become the victims of a shadowy organization that lets the ultra-rich live out their most depraved fantasies by torturing and killing unsuspecting tourists. Let’s just say that Hostel is not exactly a great promotional tourism campaign for Slovakia—something that the country was actually pretty upset about .
This 2022 film, released by the horror-centric streaming service Shudder, follows a social media influencer who, when traveling in Thailand, meets and befriends a young woman. It’s the type of movie that lives or dies on its twists, but let’s just say that Influencer is what you would get if The Talented Mr. Ripley were set in the social media age and a full-on horror film instead of a thriller.
The Creator director Gareth Edward’s 2010 debut follows a photojournalist as he tries to escort a young woman through Mexico, which has been taken over by kaiju-sized alien monsters. There are moments of beauty and discovery along their journey, as well as high-stress moments of terror when they encounter these creatures, which Edwards brings to life on a shoestring budget—though you can’t tell that by watching.
It’s right there in the title: John Landis’ 1980 comedy horror is about an American in London, although he’s not a werewolf when he first arrives in the UK. No, that happens after he’s mauled by a strange beast in the moors of Yorkshire—and that same beast kills the friend he was backpacking with. When he recovers in London, things get gnarly in the light of a full moon.
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Comedy Movies About Traveling
If you like the misadventures of the Griswold family’s first vacation attempt, great news: There are five sequels to this 1983 Chevy Chase comedy. Before the European , Vegas , or Christmas Vacation , though, Clark Griswold tries to drive his family from Chicago to southern California. Their journey makes for some classic comedy, though it might hit a bit too close to home if you’ve had to endure a family vacation that went awry.
A lot of Wes Anderson’s movies are about travel, including his most recent film, Asteroid City , and The Grand Budapest Hotel . His ultimate travel movie, though, is 2007’s The Darjeeling Limited , which stars Owen Wilson , Adrien Brody , and Jason Schwartzman as three estranged brothers who agree to make a trip through India together in the hopes of reconnecting after their father’s death.
Lots of movies are about travel, but are they about a big adventure, the way Tim Burton’s directorial debut is? Paul Reubens stars as his Pee-wee Herman character, who hits the road in an attempt to recover his beloved bicycle, which has gone missing. Following a psychic’s totally legit vision of his bike in the basement of the Alamo, Pee-wee encounters a ghost trucker, biker gangs, and all the madness of a Hollywood backlot.
Netflix’s Oscar-nominated animated movie has a setup that’s not too dissimilar from that of National Lampoon’s Vacation . Aspiring filmmaker Katie Mitchell can’t wait to get away from her family and start film school. Her dad, voiced by Danny McBride , feels his daughter slipping away and opts to have the whole fam drive her across the country rather than take a plane to school. At the same time, an A.I. gone rogue has started a robot uprising. Oops!
In addition to featuring a hall-of-fame cameo from Matt Damon as the singer of “Scotty Doesn’t Know,” Eurotrip is a classic, if not especially intelligent, teen sex romp. It’s not the movie to watch if you want to get a feel for Europe, but it is what you put on when you want to enjoy some good, dumb laughs.
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Adventure Travel Movies
Ben Stiller directed and stars in The Secret Life of Walter Mitty , an imaginative adaptation of a 1939 short story about a mild-mannered man who gets lost in his daydreams. When circumstances force Walter to embark on a trip around the world, he starts living his daydreams for real, going to Greenland and the Himalayas. Featuring a fantastic soundtrack and gorgeous cinematography of some truly beautiful, off-the-beaten-path places, The Secret Life of Walter Mitty is the type of movie that might make you stop just thinking about taking a trip and actually buy a ticket.
William Friedkin , best known for directing The Exorcist , also helmed this 1977 thriller about possibly the worst road trip of all time. When four people, all on the run from their various sordid pasts, find themselves trapped in a remote oil village in Colombia, they are desperate to get out by any means necessary. The opportunity presents itself when the bosses need people to drive boxes of dynamite that are extremely unstable and could blow at any minute across miles of rainforest. There is one sequence in Sorcerer that’s some of the most unbelievably tense filmmaking you’ll likely ever see. (Note that it’s a remake of another classic film, Wages of Fear , should you want another movie that’ll keep you on edge.)
Johnny Depp stars as an average man who finds himself smack in the middle of an international criminal incident when on vacation in Europe after a woman, played by Angelina Jolie , tries to trick the authorities into thinking Depp’s the fugitive they’re looking for. Thrills, laughs, and a little romance ensue.
Charlie Hunnam plays real explorer Percy Fawcett in this adaptation of the book by the same name from author David Grann , who also wrote Killers of the Flower Moon . The film follows the British explorer in the early 1900s as he tries, time and time again, to prove the existence of a mythical city deep in the jungles of Brazil. Think of it as a somber, reflective take on a real-life Indiana Jones, one whose obsession with traveling to hostile environments in search of knowledge may prove to be his undoing.
This gripping survival drama about the infamous 1996 Mount Everest Disaster, as documented by Jon Krakauer in the book Into Thin Air, is the type of film that will probably make you consider an all-inclusive beach resort for your next vacation rather than mountain-climbing.
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Movies About Roadtrips
This biopic follows the man who would become the Che Guevara when he, as a young man in the early ‘50s, travels across South America with his friend Alberto Granado . The film, which is based on Guevara’s trip diary, is both a road movie and a coming-of-age film about an important historical figure, as we see him become radicalized by the poverty and inequality he sees on this journey.
Margaret Qualley and Geraldine Viswanathan star in Ethan Coen’s romp from earlier this year, and it wouldn’t be inaccurate to call Drive-Away Dolls “ The Big Lebowski , but just the silly parts.” Set in the late ’90s, it follows two lesbian friends who learn that the car they’ve rented has a human head and a briefcase in the trunk—and that some shadowy types really, really want whatever’s in that case back.
Burt Reynolds stars in this 1977 classic, which was the second-highest-grossing movie of its release year after the original Star Wars . He plays a legendary bootlegger who accepts a job to smuggle 400 cases of Coors from Texarkana to Atlanta in under 28 hours. Along the way, he encounters a runaway bride played by Sally Field , and Sheriff Buford T. Justice, who wants to stop the Bandit. Smokey and the Bandit also features an incredible theme song, “ East Bound and Down ,” and while the lyrics describe the plot of the movie almost beat-for-beat, you’ll find that it’s a fitting song to blast on your own car stereo when you’re on the road.
Il Sorpasso , which is sometimes given the English title The Easy Life , is a masterpiece of 1960s Italian cinema. It follows a boisterous middle-aged man who decides to take a timid, bookish college student he meets under his wing for a good time out on the road—whether or not the younger man actually wants to tag along or not. Hilarious and poignant when you might not expect it, Il Sorpasso ’s well worth the watch.
This seminal adaptation of Hunter S. Thompson’s novel of the same name stars Johnny Depp and Benicio del Toro as they drive to Sin City under the influence of an absurd amount of drugs. In that way, it’s the ultimate travel movie. It’s about a trip, but it’s also about a trip .
