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Orlando station to undergo $2.1 million refurbishment
Silver Palm ? ? ? Must have missed an Amtrak schedule change ? Is Meteor either oing by Wildwood or the FEC ?
There hasn’t been a train named ‘Silver Palm’ since 2002. Ocala, Florida, spent over a million dollars restoring their station and then Amtrak stopped running the train. Let’s hope things turn out better in Orlando.
@Willis Tallman. I think they have covered AAF about as strongly as could be expected. On the flip side AAF has been making announcements almost weekly and that is tough for a monthly print magazine to handle. They have to wait until they finish before compiling an article for print.
From a NewsWire perspective, they have been covering most of the announcements and also had a story on the issues they are facing on the Treasure Coast.
Probably the event most people are waiting for is the order for the rolling stock.
Now that they are done announcing stations and have shown off the designs, I would expect the publication side to be prepping a feature article on what has occurred. Could they have been more in depth? Perhaps.
Trains already had a number of stories on AAF, which so far only exists on paper. I prefer to see a story on something that actually exists.
Where is your coverage of All Aboard Florida? You cover a story on fixing cracks on an old Amtrak station while AAF breaks ground for 3 amazing new HrSR stations while plans move forward for the Orlando International Airport rail terminal to cater to several railroads! TRAINS, you’re either in a different universe than the rest of us or you’ve got something against AAF. Your coverage has been abysmal! Start covering this amazing new transportation story or list yourselves as being IRRELEVANT. AAF starts laying their new track and I’ve got to find out about it from other news sources. There’s been far too little coverage here. Pick up your game!
Too bad Amtrak doesn’t reinstate service between Orlando and New Orleans either by re-extending the Sunset Limited or starting up a new train. A ,loot of people want that service restored.
AAF now says start-up in 2017, which is delayed from 2016, which is delayed from 2015. I see zero work on the new track and alignment to head west from Cocoa to Orlando. There’s tremendous local outrage on numerous high speed trains blocking road crossings but not making any stops locally. I’m not holding my breath on this one.
I think TRAINS has done fine in covering All Aboard Florida. There is nothing yet to see so there are no photos to be had. If you want minute-by-minute coverage, put AAF in your Google News aggregator. I get stuff almost every morning.
Get ready for more of this, TRAINS staff. FEC fans are especially passionate about their railroad. :-))
@ERIC HARMS - Actually they’ve started (yes! STARTED! Woohoo!) construction on “phase 1”, with the first trains running in 2016. Unfortunately phase 1 is just Miami to West Palm Beach.
Phase 2 is awaiting the EIS. That’s going to be out very soon now (should have been out months ago, but they were still inspecting crossings a few weeks ago)
Yeah, there’s a lot of opposition. The fact Indian River has banned the safety upgrades makes me concerned, but we’ll see, and I suspect the FRA or FLDOT can probably intervene in that if need be.
Trains has had dreadful coverage of AAF. There’s a massive NIMBY campaign, which has barely been mentioned. The fact it’s become a major political issue in the local elections has not been mentioned at all. One county (Indian River) is refusing to let AAF/FEC upgrade crossings to higher safety levels, which you’d have thought would merit a mention, but wasn’t. At the other extreme, AAF and Palm Beach through Miami have agreed to install quiet zones for their portion of the route.
Those are major news items. They’ve been ignored here. How many articles did we see about NIMBY opposition to that light rail system somewhere in the country whose location and name I forgot immediately?
Of course you haven’t heard much about AAF in Trains. They are so pro Amtrak they can’t bring themselves to mention a private passenger carrier that might succeed and show up Amtrak. Don’t expect much to change.
Where is that splashy front page cover on the magazine covering those amazing station plans? Where is the story and photo of the area around the future miami station being cleared? Where is the story/photo of the 35,000 feet of new welded rail having just been put in place? Where is the inside scoop on the train sets that will be built in the US and somehow be technologically more advanced than anything in the US currently (as is being reported)? Where is the story on SunRails immediate plans to move forward to the joint terminal at Orlando IA?
What’s obvious is that TRAINS is downplaying this story!
To get off the AAF “drumbeat” for a moment, and back on subject, the Orlando station COULD be a MAGNIFICENT structure to rival the San Diego terminal, but the amount of money being discussed sounds like barely enough for a coat of paint, let alone any REAL upgrading.
orlando will need more future upgrades after work on the A/C and painting and patching are finished. It’s just a start. More people will be trotting through the station daily as passenger train service increases, be it Amtrak, SunRail, AAF, or anything else. I noticed many new housing developments are being built at many SunRail stations.
@RICHARD D BROWN - Well, it’s a renovation of what’s actually a relatively run-of-the-mill provincial station.
Orlando wasn’t a significant city in the 1920s, it wasn’t until Disney came along that it turned into something major. The station was, at the time, just another stop on the ACL and wasn’t even a union station.
So without demolishing and building a new station, that Orlando station will never really be a significant structure.
In the meantime, and you’ll forgive me for segueing back to THAT subject, but what supposedly Orlando wants (which I think is silly, but…) is for their airport to be the transportation hub for the entire area, planes, trains, etc. So Orlando station itself will see nothing but the occasional renovation (as we’re seeing here) while new development will happen at MCO, with AAF (Hah! I said it!) being the first to use it with SunRail a simultaneous or close second (probably, AAF is running way behind schedule at the moment. Of course, I don’t need to tell you that, you already know about the delays and the reasons for them that after reading Trains Newswi… ohhh wait…)