Hello and welcome to the Independence Daily Travel podcast with me Simon Calder. It's Tuesday the 8th of August and I've got some mostly good news about trains in America, which is actually quite a rare thing because there isn't very much. The American Railroad of course transformed a nation,

linked it all together, but starting I guess in the 1950s, when you had mass car ownership,

you also had expanding opportunities to travel by air. The railway was just left behind and that's where it has remained

Amtrak the National Passenger Railroad Corporation was set up to try to rescue things in the

1970s all it's done really is take billions, maybe even trillion. Now, dollars from

taxpayers and run a pretty dismal service in my experience. All the people who work on the railways

are great, but the rolling stock they use is lousy. Everything's really slow. The one thing you can say about it is that the

fares are low. Anyway, as from next month, September, 2023, there is going to be a transformation

in one of the most important states for British visitors, and that is Florida, the the Sunshine State there is a line which has

actually been in place for about five years running from Miami via Fort Lauderdale to West Palm

Beach about 50 60 miles or so along the east coast and that's really handy in connecting those places. It's run by

Brightline for a time. It was actually known as Virgin Trains. But Sir Richard Branson has divested

himself of the interest in that. The great news is that they have been working very hard on an

extension to Orlando.

So you will then have the two main cities for British visitors to Florida connected by rail.

It's mostly good news, as I say, because, well, at the moment, if you want to travel between the two by train, well, good luck

with that. You've got the Silver Meteor, which leaves at 10 past 8 in the morning, takes just

over five hours to get there. And you've also got the Silver Star, 1140am, and that takes

seven and a half hours, and that's assuming things are on time.

Now, those do run to downtown Orlando. Brightline will actually be running to and from Orlando

Airport. But I will give it a pass on that because of the transformative nature. The journey is going to take three hours, 30 minutes.

That's an average of 70 miles an hour and you might be thinking, hang on, I could drive on the

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