Amtrak Unveils Chicago-Miami Floridian

By Jim Mathews / President & CEO

Yes, Virginia, it’s true...there’s going to be a one-seat Amtrak ride between Chicago and Miami beginning on November 10th. And yes, the rumors were true that Amtrak decided to name the new, temporary service “The Floridian.”

I know from talking with our members over the years that they have had a long-standing dream of restoring a one-seat ride from the Midwest to Florida, somehow. The last time the original Floridian ran I was a freshman in high school, so I’m thrilled that a new generation of Midwest passengers will be able to enjoy a straight (well, straight-ish...more on that below) shot to Florida for themselves.

The creation of this train by combining the Capitol Limited and Silver Star trains is exactly what we mean when people use the cliché about making lemonade from lemons. The East River Tunnel project is badly needed, but taking the tunnel complex down to one tube will inevitably crimp traffic throughout the northeast. These tunnels have been in service for a century, and they took a beating during Superstorm Sandy in 2021, so there’s really no more putting off this vital work any longer.

This clever move by Amtrak will free up badly needed equipment while taking pressure off Northeast Corridor infrastructure during the tunnel renovations. That’s why this is a temporary service change, but in this instance “temporary” could mean several years. And during that time, Amtrak will evaluate whether temporary should become permanent.

I applaud Amtrak, and especially the folks in the Consist Planning department, for this innovative solution to keeping passengers moving during critical state of good repair work and based on my conversations with members I really believe riders will flock to this new service.

Amtrak started feeding the new schedule data into the reservations system over the weekend and ticket sales began yesterday. As it happens, that was about the time I was squeezing myself into seat 20L on an American Airlines flight to Berlin for the InnoTrans railway and transit expo...which is why I missed all the Sunday night fireworks among the railfan community. But the comment sections across social media were hopping Monday morning before Amtrak made the official announcement, blowing up my phone while I shuffled through customs and immigration. It just never ceases to amaze me how much hay some of the rumormongers can make with just a handful of facts.

Now that the announcement was made completely official Monday afternoon, let’s share some facts.

If you live in the Northeast and you want to go to Miami, you can still take the Silver Meteor from New York City. And if you used to take the Star because it makes stops in a handful of places the Meteor does not, now you take the Floridian instead. Amtrak is maintaining all of the current connections – places like Pittsburgh, Richmond, and Raleigh, among others -- plus all of the ADA accomdations.

If you’re a regular Capitol Limited rider fed up with Flexible/Contemporary dining, now you get traditional dining thanks to the combination with the Star, which restored Traditional dining last Spring. And if you’re a coach passenger on the Floridian, you’ll be able to “buy in” to meals on the dining car just as Star passengers did before this move.

If you’re a regular rider on Amtrak’s western trains and have been shouting to the rafters about the need for more Superliners, well, now you’ll get them, courtesy of the Capitol’s consists, which will be turned over to the western trains. No, it doesn’t solve the problem of using up valuable Superliners to satisfy Canadian National’s “axle count” signaling requirement, but that’s another problem for another day. Shifting the Capitol Limited’s Superliners to the western trains eases the capacity problems on those very popular routes.

The schedule got a few tweaks in order to bring the two timetables for the Capitol and the Star together, but for many stations the new timetable will be an improvement.

Amtrak has been talking internally for some time about how to deal with the crew changes, and the need to service the equipment as it rolls into Washington Union Station. They’ve also anticipated the need for Redcaps to help with luggage transfers from New England and New York passengers taking Northeast Corridor trains to DC to catch the Floridian.

Why not just restore the actual Floridian on the route it once ran? Well, for one thing, some of that track isn’t even there anymore, which would make that restoration just about impossible. But then there’s negotiations with the Class I host railroads; working out schedule changes on territory where Amtrak already runs is a LOT easier than trying to put together a genuinely restored route where Amtrak does not already run today. Remember, the century-old East River Tunnel complex was flooded a bit more than three years ago, and we’ve been running trains through them since. Waiting for a more complex negotiation to take place would not have been a smart move.

And why call it the Floridian? No, it’s not the SAME Floridian. But that’s not a hill I plan to die on. We’ve been pressing Amtrak for years to come up with a way to introduce something like a one-seat ride between the Midwest and Florida and here they’ve done it, in a way that makes more capacity available elsewhere in the system and adds passenger amenities at the same time without requiring giant new sums from Congress. The name celebrates this achievement in a way that signals instantly to people who might not have been alive when the original Floridian ended that there's a train they can catch to Florida.

I’ll take it. And so should you! Maybe I’ll see you on board?