Tri-Rail offered to lead new Miami-Dade rail plans

As transportation planners seek more rail service in Miami-Dade County, the board chairman of tri-county Tri-Rail says it, rather than the county, should be driving the train.

“I think that Tri-Rail should be the operator” of new Miami-Dade rail service, Raquel Regalado, board chair of the South Florida Regional Transportation Authority, which runs Tri-Rail, told the Miami-Dade Transportation Planning Organization last week as it discussed adding service on disused CSX tracks.

“There has been a change at the federal level [where railroads are overseen and which would help fund rail additions] in terms of modeling, security and investment in rail lines,” said Ms. Regalado, who is also a Miami-Dade commissioner. “That’s knowledge that is not at our transit department.”

Other county commissioners, who all sit with her on the transportation planning organization, did not dispute Ms. Regalado or discuss or act on her call for Tri-Rail control.

“I can tell you that our new executive director at Tri-Rail used to work at CSX and has wonderful relationships there, but I would caution you when creating this scope, my conversations with CSX, 85% of that conversation was about freight, and our transit department doesn’t know about freight.”

David Dech, who took over as executive director of the agency running Tri-Rail last August as it tries to engineer its service into downtown Miami, began his career in 1995 as a brakeman and switchman at CSX Transportation on its freight side. He rose to trainmaster, assistant terminal superintendent, assistant vice president of transportation, and assistant vice president for passenger operations for CSX in several cities before leaving in 2018 to become vice president of rail operations for CapitalMetro in Austin, TX.

“The airport actually knows more about freight than our transit department does,” Ms. Regalado continued. “The port knows some too.”