The Treasure Coast Brightline Station Will Be Located In - Get Ready For It - Stuart!

To everyone's surprise, the new Brightline train station serving Florida's "Treasure Coast" will be located in none other than Stuart, where my sister Susan and I own a condo that we inherited from our mother Mary. Brightline recently started high-speed rail service between Miami and Orlando and promised to put a station between West Palm Beach and Orlando within 4 years. Everyone was convinced that station would be located in Fort Pierce, which would be more centrally located, but Brightline chose Stuart instead. A columnist for the Stuart News believes that was because Stuart is a wealthier community than Fort Pierce, and people there will be much more likely to purchase those very costly tickets. My theory is that Brightline intends to add a second station farther north at a later date. In any case, the station will be located several blocks to the east of the downtown area, behind the Martin County Courthouse. I myself do not have a photograph of that location, since it is just an empty parking lot, but I did take a "selfie" years ago of myself, as seen on the left, in front of Luna, a pizza and pasta restaurant in Old Town Stuart, which is just across the street from the railroad tracks those 110 mile-per-hour trains traverse.

One good thing about a station in Stuart is that those trains will have to slow down when they reach the city limits, which will make crossing those tracks far less dangerous. Ever since train service began, some people have been trying to beat the train across the tracks, not familiar with how fast a 110 mile-per-hour train can travel, sometimes with disastrous results. The bad thing about the decision is that a lot of people who live in Vero Beach and points north say it will be too far a drive to get to the station. As for Susan and me, it will mean we can take the light rail train to the airport in Denver, fly to Florida, take the Brightline train to Stuart, and get off only a mile or so from our condo. And so to hell with all those people from Vero Beach. In any case, the article in the Stuart News says that the station in Stuart will be very similar to the one in Boca Raton, located just across from a shopping district called Mizner Park, which Susan and I and our mother visited a number of times. This brought back memories and also a search for the photograph seen on the right, which I took at Mizner Park back in October of 1994. That is another trip that can soon (in 4 years or so) be taken via Brightline, still another experience that all those complainers in Vero Beach will miss out on. Tough.