Amtrak - Miami to Orlando time?

In Miami with grandkids. thought about doing Disney World this weekend but don’t really want to drive. Drive time on the Florida turnpike is three hours. Looking at ATK web site it shows Silver Star at 7.5 hours and Silver Meteor at 6 hours. and that if the trains run on time which they never are. how the hell can it be twice the time of driving the same route? Gosh there is no hope for Amtrak with these travel times.

Blame the host RR,CSX for poor dispatching practices,Routing is not a straight line,you run to near Winterhaven,before heading south to
Miami,unless you can get the FEC to play nice with Amtrak,you are stuck with the current route and host RR,CSX

carajul wrote:In Miami with grandkids. thought about doing Disney World this weekend but don’t really want to drive. Drive time on the Florida turnpike is three hours. Looking at ATK web site it shows Silver Star at 7.5 hours and Silver Meteor at 6 hours. and that if the trains run on time which they never are. how the hell can it be twice the time of driving the same route? Gosh there is no hope for Amtrak with these travel times.

Brightline Orlando route is what you want but it is not ready yet unfortunately. The rail system that Amtrak uses has not been upgraded and it has to compete with very active freight rail traffic. Amtrak is still running at Hileah station and will eventually move its station. I am not sure how Amtrak will compete with Brightline to Orlando if at all.

I am not aware of what Amtrak’s plans are except for moving the station from Hileah to Miami later this year.

It is what it is!! Amtrak is not a bad ride up to Orlando but it can not match the time on the Interstates. One reason is that the LD trains spend way too much time in stations handling checked baggage and checking tickets and assigning seates before boarding the train. Check on 98 some time and you will see that they spend in excess of 5 minutes in Fort Lauderdale every trip north. Amtrak takes 1 hour and 37 minutes from Miami to West Palm Beach making only four intermediate stops while Tri-Rail takes 1 hour and 40 minutes from Metro-Rail Transfer to West Palm making 14 intermediate stops. The Tri-Rail owned trackage between Mangonia Park and Miami Airport is dispatched by Amtrak employees under contract to Tri-Rail and CSX dispatches north of Mangonia Park to a point near Orlando. There is little or no other train traffic on the stretch of track owned and dispatched by CSX so I don't see how you can hardly blame CSX dispatching at least in this stretch. Sometimes in the summer time they have heat orders in effect which will slow down all of the trains on all of the railroads due to expansion of the rail causing heat kinks in the track. Better to slow down than to end up all over the real estate. I am not sure exactly what the restrictions are with heat orders these days but they can result in some delays.
Noel Weaver

FLL = TPA times on I-75 are closer to Amtrak Star times

adamj023 wrote:I am not aware of what Amtrak’s plans are except for moving the station from Hileah to Miami later this year.

Mr. Adam J, has a date been set for Amtrak moving to the MIC. If so, that is a new development; it is also a quite surprising one, so far as I'm concerned.

Here is discussion regarding Miami Intermodal:

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