A Brightline passenger train hit a fully loaded car carrier in Florida on Wednesday evening. The collision was captured in a video shared by WPLG Local 10, showing the violence of the impact and the scope of destruction.
According to an ABC affiliate, the video was filmed in Hollywood, Florida in the north of the Miami metro area. A semi-truck hauling a car carrier laden with luxury cars had stopped overlapping the level crossing; the lack of clearance between the trailer and the ground in the video suggests the trailer may have become high-centered. With the truck’s rear wheels in deep water due to a heavy storm that caused a tornado warning that evening, it may have lacked the traction to free the trailer before the northbound Brightline train out of Miami reached the crossing.
The impact tore the trailer from the semi, tossing it into a pole supporting traffic lights. As the camera passes by the wreckage, it shows damage to several luxury cars on board the trailer. We can identify a Porsche Macan or Cayenne, a BMW SUV that may be an X5, and what appear to be Cadillac and Mercedes-Benz sedans. Their combined values likely far exceed $100,000, and that’s before factoring in damage the train and affected infrastructure sustained.
As the video shows, the Brightline train didn’t get away unscathed. One door on the locomotive was smashed in, while the height of the trailer makes it likely the cab took some damage in the collision. While this may have injured the engineer, the Hollywood Police Department had not stated whether any injuries were sustained in the crash as of early Thursday afternoon.
Brightline confirmed early Thursday morning that service had been resumed in South Florida where the collision had occurred.
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