Brightline founder and chairman Wes Edens shares his vision for Florida rail

Wes Edens was a ranch kid with curiosity who grew up to be a high-flying investor with a calendar full of jet travel to his energy enterprises in Brazil, to his hangout in Wyoming, to the Milwaukee Bucks NBA team he co-owns and to mountain climbing adventures.

He also may transform how Floridians and visitors travel in the Sunshine State. He conceived of and founded Brightline Trains, which is about to carry passengers between Miami and Orlando with several stops along the way.

When mayors of Orlando, Orange County, Palm Beach County, Aventura and Miami met up at the Orlando airport Brightline station a few days ago to commemorate completion of Brightline’s construction, Edens as chairman of Florida’s new passenger railroad, was there.

The 62-year-old lingered nearly anonymously behind the audience in a blazer and comfortable shoes as just your regular billionaire in blue jeans. He was approachable but left the spotlight on others. He did sit for a few minutes to discuss his Brightline vision.

This is what he shared, edited for length.

Orlando Sentinel: How did you get your idea for Brightline?

Edens: It really came from a book. You know, it sounds funny, but it’s true. I grew up on a ranch in Montana and I read a lot of books because there wasn’t TV. I bought a book that was a biography about Flagler that I thought was great, telling you the story of how he lived his life. He came to Florida and decided to change his life and become a builder. You can see the benefits of what’s happened to the state ever since.

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OS: If I may stop you on behalf of the millions who come from elsewhere to live in Florida and ask who?

Edens: Henry Flagler was the longtime partner of John D. Rockefeller. Those two guys sat together in an office in Cleveland, Ohio, I think for 12 years, back to back in chairs and they walked to lunch every day. I think the story is that his wife became ill, they went to Jacksonville on a steamship for the wintertime and she shortly thereafter passed away. And, as the story goes, he went back to Rockefeller and said ‘I don’t want to do this anymore.’ I think he was 51 or 52 years old, which is, coincidentally, about the age that I was when I started building this train. He said ‘I want to do something that I think is meaningful.’ I think the actual story is that he bought the hotel there in St. Augustine and to get to that hotel there was three miles of railroad and two or three different operators and it was kind of a mess. And so he decided to fix the mess, which was his only exposure to railroads, and then basically said ‘Look, I’m gonna build a train now that connects the rest of Florida.’ I found it compelling on many levels, not the least of which was that he was doing something that nobody else had done before and doing it in a way that was profoundly impactful.

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OS: You are banking on the notion that people are fed up with traffic and wary of flying.

Edens: We said let’s go around the world and look at other systems that we think are comparable and take lessons learned from the best practices. The one thing that becomes very clear is there’s a real rule of thumb that the more time that you save people, the more likely they are to ride a train rather than drive. It’s not that complicated. And as just a general rule, if you save people an hour or two, about a quarter of them will get out of their cars and get into your train. If you save them more than two hours, 50 percent or more will get out of their cars. We looked at systems from Paris to London, from Paris to Leon, Madrid to Seville, from Milan to Rome, and said, look, there’s no doubt at all that intercity train travel is extremely attractive. There’s no doubt in my mind or our minds that this could be very successful, we just had to execute it properly.

OS: What’s the sensibility or personality of Brightline travel?

Edens: What we talk about all the time is the culture of delivering the experience that we ourselves would want to participate in. So I just tried to do this in a very simple way of imagining myself sitting in that train seat for three hours from Miami to Orlando, and would I be happy, comfortable, productive, well served. I think that that really is the ethos, the inspiration we tried to accomplish. If you’ve ridden the train, it smells like a good hotel and it looks like service at high quality. It’s a very, very purposeful experience that we’re trying to create for people. In South Florida, we’ve gone from zero riders to over 2 million riders. So I think that we can check that box and say so far so good. And now it’s just about time to start coming to Orlando, which is when I think the real expression of the service will become manifest.

OS: From way back when Brightline began to emerge in Central Florida’s awareness, there was a steady chatter that it can’t work, that people won’t ride, that it’s a play for government subsidy. You heard all of that.

Edens: Yeah, all that and more, I mean, people attributed a lot of different things to what we’re trying to do. I’m a very direct and transparent person. I just wanted the train to get built to Orlando, give it a chance to be successful, give it a chance to connect these two great cities: the most heavily visited city in America, Orlando, and the most internationally visited city, Miami. I think that there are so many people that for both business and for leisure they’re going to want to experience this. The third phase is connecting to Tampa and I think that that’s a challenge. I think once you do connect from Tampa to Miami, then you have a connected Florida, and then you can have all the adjacencies and all the tributaries and capillaries that will go from there. That’s really the goal.

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OS: Safety at crossings from Miami to Cocoa has been a concern.

Edens: We’ve invested tens of millions of dollars for rail crossings, for everything we can do practically to make them as safe as possible. We have cameras on every crossing. We actually scrutinize every incident that happens. We feel like we’ve done everything humanly possible to make it as safe as possible. And I think with peoples’ awareness of the train and the speeds at which we run, I think it’s gotten incrementally better. But it will be, you know, a constant search for us to make it as safe as possible. Think about this: if we end up with 6 or 8 or 10 million people on our trains versus on the roads, we will save hundreds of lives. You have to look at it holistically. There are a lot of people that don’t get hurt or killed on highways because they’re on a train. But we take the issues of safety incredibly seriously.