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.

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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.

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The Brightline runs on the route of the original Florida East Coast Railway, which was built in the late 1800s by Henry Flagler, a Standard Oil tycoon. Flagler is popularly credited with “inventing” modern Florida: His railroad allowed for the development of swampland into a series of luxury resorts dotting the coast. Everything grew up around this track—it’s the vein running through all of the oldest cities and most densely populated areas of South Florida.

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As a result, once-familiar environments have been transformed. Take, for example, the story of Joann DePina, a 49-year-old mother of two who was killed by a Brightline train in January. DePina was walking over the tracks that cut through her neighborhood, but she was doing so on a well-worn footpath. She was technically trespassing, but there weren’t any fences or no trespassing signs, and it was a logical thing to do. DePina rented a room in a sober-living house on one side of the tracks and was crossing to get to a group meeting on the other side. She had been in recovery since 2017 and was saving money to move into her own apartment.

I walked along the tracks with her aunt Maria Furtado in May. Furtado showed me the footpath, next to the white cross she’d put up in her niece’s memory. In person, it was clear why people would walk there: The tracks split the neighborhood in half, with tightly packed houses on one side and a row of businesses on the other. To get around the tracks legally would require walking down to an intersection to cross, then walking back, adding at least 10 minutes. Taking a shortcut over the tracks looks easy enough, and it was probably easy to do so safely during the decades when freight trains were the only traffic. Hence the worn path.

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Many train tracks are elevated to cross above roadways. Others are sunken down to cross beneath them. But the Brightline’s track intersects flatly, or “at grade,” with the roads on much of its route, including the part that runs through central Miami.

Many states have undertaken grade-crossing-elimination projects over the past half century because they make train routes dramatically safer. On the Amtrak route between Washington, D.C., and New York City, the highest-trafficked stretch of train track in the country, there are no grade crossings. The last one was eliminated in the 1980s.

There are 331 grade crossings along the Brightline route in South Florida. James Hopkins, a former Brightline conductor, cited this when explaining to me why he no longer works for the company. He mostly enjoyed his time at Brightline, he said—the company was a good employer—but he didn’t want to work on that route anymore in large part because of how often the train would hit people. At his previous job operating a freight train in the 200-mile stretch between Pittsburgh and Harrisburg, he said there were 40 to 50 grade crossings. In the 65 miles between West Palm Beach and Miami, there are 174. “It’s just real busy,” he told me. “The fatalities—this was just something I didn’t want to continue doing.”

When I visited the West Palm Beach area to look at the crossings and roads in person, I drove over the tracks dozens of times. They cut through the landscape at strange angles and in unexpected places—behind the downtown courthouse, alongside a Little League field in Delray Beach. People have been struck and killed by Brightline trains at both of these locations.

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Brightline says that it is an advocate for closing certain crossings on its route, but that this rarely happens “without local support.” Because of all the elements at any intersection, the process of closing even one crossing can be convoluted and expensive. Sealing off the entire Brightline route or elevating the entire track would simply not be economically feasible for a private company.

Still, over a period of months, I spoke with several experts who had different opinions on many of the technical details but who all agreed that there’s no real mystery behind the Brightline deaths. “Fast trains and grade crossings are always a deadly combination,” the historian Richard White, whose 2011 book about American railroads was a Pulitzer Prize finalist, told me. He put it the most succinctly, but I did not talk with anybody who disagreed with that conclusion.