Tri-Rail transfers to get downtown won’t disappear soon

Although Tri-Rail last month arrived downtown from Palm Beach and Broward counties seven years late, it will take still more time before riders can enjoy those 26 daily trips without changing trains in Hialeah, the man driving the system said last week.

“Everybody wants direct service, and we’re going to do everything we can to start that as soon as we can, but I don’t have a timeline on that right now,” David Dech, executive director of the South Florida Regional Transportation Authority, told the Citizens’ Independent Transportation Trust, which helped fund the route.

A long blitz of snafus hectored Tri-Rail as it failed to meet a March 2017 arrival target downtown. Mr. Dech, a career-long railroader, came aboard just over a year ago and finally met the goal in January. He told the trust last week he couldn’t guarantee a start for 26 pledged direct trips daily; he said it might be three years, though some will be direct far sooner.

“As we’re speaking, we’re trying to find out which ones can we bring in directly and what can we do there,” he said.

“We will have some direct trains and we want to work with different events and different ways we can do things,” he said. “We’re trying to figure that out right now. I really was hyper-laser focused on getting this open as quickly as I could.”

He noted that at the Metrorail Transfer Station, where riders now switch trains, 75 trains from various systems roll through every 20 hours and the window is tight. They include CSX freight trains, Amtrak national passenger service, Brightline privately owned rail, and the Florida East Coast Railway freight system.

The big barrier to direct trips is that Tri-Rail’s only locomotives allowed to enter downtown are its Brookvilles. Only four of them have been upgraded to meet requirements, four others are being upgraded now and more will follow in a three-year program, Mr. Dech said. Tri-Rail has funding to buy new locomotives but doesn’t yet have them, he added.

“We really want to look for ways to improve the service,” he told the trust. “The shuttle is a great way to get started. It’s not the end goal.”

“What we’re really focused on,” he said, “is making that transfer as quick and seamless as it can be.” He noted that when he rode Tri-Rail to the transfer site to come to the evening trust meeting at county hall, “I got off one train and I could see the headlights of the other coming to pick me up.”

Eliminating downtown changes in Hialeah won’t end transfers there – passengers with luggage headed to Miami International Airport will have to exit some trains that are going downtown and transfer to the airport, Mr. Dech noted.

“We’re trying to balance that,” he said, because “someone was always going to make a transfer at that Metro Transfer Station, whether it was passengers going downtown or those headed to the airport.”

As Tri-Rail completes its direct link to downtown and Miami-Dade studies new passenger rail links to South Dade and from the airport to the west, the publicly own rail service may get new challenges.

Joseph Curbelo, a trust member since 2010 who was aboard when Tri-Rail got funding from the tax money that the trust oversees, told Mr. Dech there are “other routes that I think your organization is in position to help establish in our community.”

Replied Mr. Dech, “I think it’s an exciting time for rail in South Florida. I think there’s a lot of opportunity.”