My run of luck has ended. After a nice trip on an unwrapped Bright Green Friday and two fantastic cocktails at MCO this morning (a French 75 and a Bee's Knees) I boarded an Orlando-wrapped Bright Pink.
Brightline Trains Florida discussion 2024
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cirdan
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The legend "Unbelievably real" seems somehow deeply cynical on a train that won't let you look out of the window.
So, I feel the need to revise and extend my remarks above on Brightline's Q2 losses...
I realize the accounting rules in play require doing some weird things, but if you go with EBITDA (which doesn't tell the whole story here, mind you), you end up throwing out a lot of lines here.
The loss showed in Q1 is $116,275k. Let's back things out bit by bit:
-First, remove depreciation/amortization. These are weird items that mess with your "actual" cash flow and the projected useful life of equipment is, at best, a SWAG on a good day. That reduces your loss by $30,998k. The "cash loss" is thus $85,277k.
-Second, remove interest expense - I would justify this for purposes of our discussion as it lays out where Brightline might be if you ended up with a bankruptcy. It also allows a better comparison with Amtrak routes. This removes $75,059k from the expense ledger, leaving about $10,218k in losses.
If the remaining expenses yield a loss of $10,218k against revenues of $48,930k, then over in Amtrak-land we'd presumably be looking at a cost recovery rate of about 82.7% (and this is without discharging corporate overhead expenses - direct train operating costs would actually be rather a bit lower and the direct train operations would show a small profit even if you also throw out "Other revenue").
To be clear, if we were looking at multiple lines, I'd throw the overhead out when evaluating each one.
I realize the accounting rules in play require doing some weird things, but if you go with EBITDA (which doesn't tell the whole story here, mind you), you end up throwing out a lot of lines here.
The loss showed in Q1 is $116,275k. Let's back things out bit by bit:
-First, remove depreciation/amortization. These are weird items that mess with your "actual" cash flow and the projected useful life of equipment is, at best, a SWAG on a good day. That reduces your loss by $30,998k. The "cash loss" is thus $85,277k.
-Second, remove interest expense - I would justify this for purposes of our discussion as it lays out where Brightline might be if you ended up with a bankruptcy. It also allows a better comparison with Amtrak routes. This removes $75,059k from the expense ledger, leaving about $10,218k in losses.
If the remaining expenses yield a loss of $10,218k against revenues of $48,930k, then over in Amtrak-land we'd presumably be looking at a cost recovery rate of about 82.7% (and this is without discharging corporate overhead expenses - direct train operating costs would actually be rather a bit lower and the direct train operations would show a small profit even if you also throw out "Other revenue").
To be clear, if we were looking at multiple lines, I'd throw the overhead out when evaluating each one.
See my above discussion of the projections, which are a mess. Also, the pandemic messed with many of the timelines.
So...IIRC they aren't really within projections but the projections are close to useless.
Edit: I'm going to elaborate on this. The pre-pandemic timeline obviously went out the window in the spring of 2020, so we can't use those as-is. There's a sort of revised timeline in play (basically, if you take the entire project and shove a "missing" year into it). Brightline's ridership and so on are still well below this trend, but that's complicated by the lack of train capacity.
The models have looked wildly different at different times. There's one version of the projections where we'd be closing in on 10m riders per year, but in those projections you have PortMiami and Disney Springs stations open. But the one thing they all have in common is that there has never been a plan to order enough equipment to actually provide the necessary seats to enable that ridership. Even at ten cars long (and all of the added cars having 66 seats), you'd only have 7.5m seats/yr [1]. As I have noted earlier - yes, there would be some seat turnover, but you also can't get to a 100% load factor, and Brightline's revenue projections from Disney Springs in this model indicate that the vast majority of projected ridership would be from South Florida, not folks jumping on to go from the airport to Disney. You'd need 856 passengers/train to make the 2024-25 ridership numbers in the 2019 projections (or, 13-car trains if they stick to once-hourly service).
Make what assumptions you will, but Brightline has almost always required passenger loads which have exceeded plausible capacity once the orders were placed with Siemens.
[1] 644 seats/train (nine 66-seat cars plus one 50-seat Premium car) * 32 one-way trips per day * 365 days per year = 7,521,920 seats/yr.
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Presumably, the situation will more than correct itself when additional coaches are delivered.
west point
Engineer
Any idea when the additional cars will be arriving and then put into service?
jis
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The first tranche of 10 will arrive before the end of this month and will be deployed soon after they arrive.
Not with the current order(s) it won't. I got into hypothetical capacity stuff above. In several other posts I've gone into great detail about questions of where Brightline's "pinch point" (where demand peaks out) is and other details. But in practical terms, it looks like based on current capacity their ridership slams into a brick wall around 230k riders/month. For clarification, that's about 240 passengers/train [1]. Yes, there's turnover en route - but there's also been close to a 1:1 tradeoff as of late between MIA-WPB traffic and Orlando traffic, and I'd also point out that there are always going to be some frequencies where you just can't sell the train out even if peak hours are sold out - 10 PM on a Sunday night is not going to generate the sorts of ridership that 5 PM on Friday will. You could probably squeeze a little more ridership out with stops in the Treasure Coast and Cocoa, but I think in general this is where we are for the time being.
The existing orders don't quite double train capacity - you could mark off about a 75% increase and be close enough, so the new cars would get you somewhere around 400k/month. That translates to 4.8m/year, maybe 5.0m or a little more if you increase turnover. Even a generous full doubling gets you to 460k riders/month, or 5.5m/yr. The latest official projection for 2026 is 8.0m riders, and there's no equipment on order behind the current batch of 30 cars (bringing sets to 7 cars) so I don't think we could plausibly expect new equipment to show up prior to late 2026. Even that would be very optimistic considering the ongoing Amtrak equipment orders that Brightline would need to slot in alongside.
Given that I believe the Brightline platforms max out at roughly 10 cars (I think all of the platforms at the intermediate stations measure 850 feet; Miami and Orlando are a bit longer), the simple fact of the matter is that in order to make those 2026 projections of 8.0m pax (22k/day) you'd need to add a few more frequencies as well as extend the trains to 10 cars. I think you'd need another 3-4 round trips per day.
[1] Assuming 16 round-trips per day and a 30-day month. It's actually a little lower because of the additional late night/early morning trains on the WPB-MIA segment, but I think it is close enough for our purposes.
Yeah, running one batch of ten cars across the country is cheaper than ten batches of one car.
cirdan
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I wonder how price sensitive riders are. What if the shortfall in income were to be bridged by not adding riders, but by increasing fares? At least on the trains that always sell out anyway. This would have the additional advantage that some price-sensitive riders might be displaced onto less popular trains, freeing up more high value space on the popular ones. Possibly overall income might grow faster than the individual fares are growing.
thefirewarde
Service Attendant
They potentially could run certain timings as first and second sections, but they're already pretty thin on margins for the bridge closures and this might require another two or three consists - not a near term option.
jis
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I heard at the FECRS Meeting that they have at least one scheduled slot which runs effectively in two sections separated by 5 minutes.
As far as ordering and receiving more cars goes....
As I have mentioned before, subsequent tranches of 10 cars will arrive at 6 month intervals.
Apparently they also have regular interval timed tranche options that they can exercise something like a year before delivery date, a sort of slot reservation. Don't know the details of this. Just heard a vague mention once or twice.
I mean, per-passenger ticket revenue has gotten "stuck" as well, at 25% below officially projected levels. Some massaging of the yield management system might help, as might a repeat of a version of the "Smart+" offering.
So, Brightline looks like they've decided to approach the revenue issue by reducing the credits (not even refunds) given within 48 hours of departure for "full fare" customers to 50%.
Congrats, Brightline - now AA and DL have a distinct edge on you with respect to refund policy.
[I'm also not sure how this would interact with any 24 hour refund policy, either.]
Congrats, Brightline - now AA and DL have a distinct edge on you with respect to refund policy.
[I'm also not sure how this would interact with any 24 hour refund policy, either.]
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cirdan
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Methinks that if a train is regularly fully booked, that there is room to raise fares.
Which seems to be what's happening with Amtrak sleepers. (And some other routes, especially the NEC.)
