Vital Tri-Rail snafus due a fast airing

Miami-Dade County’s commissioner representative on Tri-Rail’s governing board, Raquel Regalado, has insisted on a meeting being held before the holidays to discuss major issues Tri-Rail is facing in bringing its commuter service into downtown Miami.

Miami’s Downtown Development Authority donated $1 million to that $70 million project.

“Commissioner Regalado is the county’s representative on the Tri-Rail board,” Commissioner Eileen Higgins told the Downtown Development Authority meeting Dec. 17. “I’m not sure that every fact will be correct, so that’s what we’re hoping the board will disclose at their meeting on the 22nd” of December, Ms. Higgins said.

“Several months ago, Brightline informed Tri-Rail that their stairs came very close to their platform. Apparently Tri-Rail complains that the contractor messed up their size,” Ms. Higgins said. “But it sounded like there was the ability to modify the stairs to make a safer fit.”

“Another discussion is about whether the viaduct (with tracks leading into the downtown station) is strong enough to support the Tri-Rail trains that weigh more than Brightline trains,” Ms. Higgins said. There are two different rail standards for weight. One is cargo weight and the other is passenger. “If you’re carrying port cargo, you’ll have a different cart than carrying people. I think that will become clearer at the meeting,” she said.

The third area Ms. Higgins thinks will be addressed at the meeting is automatic train control. “Tri-Rail hasn’t procured the equipment that the Florida East Coast Railway requires. The tracks aren’t owned by Brightline anymore. The tracks are owned by Grupo Mexico,” which is requiring that every train using its facility must have automatic train control, Ms. Higgins said. “Until an IGR (inspector general) report came out, I didn’t realize that Tri-Rail hadn’t made progress on automatic train control.”

According to the Federal Railroad Administration, “Positive Train Control (PTC) systems are designed to prevent train-to-train collisions, over-speed derailments, incursions into established work zones, and movements of trains through switches left in the wrong position.”

At the end of last year, the railroad administration said that “PTC technology is in operation on all 57,536 required freight and passenger railroad route miles” meeting a deadline set by Congress.

The railroad administration also said that “interoperability has been achieved between each applicable host and tenant railroad that currently operates on PTC-governed main lines.” Tri-Rail would become a tenant railroad on the tracks owned by Grupo Mexico.

“So the real question is,” Ms. Higgins told the DDA board, “what information the executive director and their legal counsel at Tri-Rail was not disclosing to board for nine months?”