In the foreword to the 2008 reissue of Gaeton Fonzi’s book on the Kennedy assassination, The Last Investigation, I wrote that one of the saddest elements in this very sad affair was the failure of American media in covering the crime of a century. Specifically mentioned were several newspapers, including The New York Times, Philadelphia Inquirer, Washington Post and The Miami Herald. All of them had access to information which demanded attention, and got very little.
The Herald was on the list because so much detail surrounding the murder of a president relates to South Florida and the CIA’s involvement in anti-Castro activities. Also because, in 1980, what became Fonzi’s landmark book first appeared in the pages of Gold Coast magazine, right under the Herald's nose. Fonzi put in 14 more years investigating before his book was published.
Fonzi became a government investigator for five years precisely because he was in South Florida. Pennsylvania Sen. Richard Schweiker was convinced that the key to a conspiracy could be found here. He hired Fonzi because he remembered a 1960s article in Philadelphia Magazine, in which the writer confronted Arlen Specter, later a longtime U.S. senator from Pennsylvania, and found that the man who came up with the “magic bullet” theory could not explain it. Specter was not prepared for the detailed knowledge of President Kennedy’s wounds that Fonzi brought to the interview.
Schweiker, whose position gave him access to information few had seen, had done his own research and concluded that Lee Harvey Oswald was an intelligence operative. Fonzi’s job was to prove it, and he did. At least he came up with a credible source, a highly respected Cuban working for years for the CIA in attempts to overthrow Castro, who saw Oswald with his CIA handler in Dallas shortly before the assassination.
It was a stunning revelation, and although largely ignored by mainstream media, it was the germ of a number of subsequent investigations over 30 years which have convinced most Americans that it was a conspiracy high in the U.S. government, not a lone nut, that killed President Kennedy.
Next year is the 50th anniversary of the crime, and already books designed to capitalize on that fact are appearing. Which brings us to the Herald. Sunday it ran a long front-page article about a book soon to be published by a retired CIA analyst that claims that Fidel Castro knew in advance of plans to murder President Kennedy. The play the story got makes it appear this is sensational new information. It isn’t. Castro knew that the U.S. had tried to kill him, and sources leaking rumors that President Kennedy would be murdered have been known for years, and almost always trace to CIA figures. The obvious implication is that if he heard such reports Castro must have had something to do with it.
The author of the Herald piece, columnist Glenn Garvin, is the same fellow who some months back wondered why 70 percent of the American people still think there was a conspiracy behind JFK’s death. Well, one reason is that the House Select Committee on Assassinations, for which Gaeton Fonzi worked, came to that conclusion, although it never pinpointed the conspirators. Fonzi, whose personal experience was both in the field in South Florida and inside work in Washington, was so unhappy with the vagueness of his committee’s report that he wrote a dissenting opinion – the magazine articles which eventually became his book. He concluded that if our intelligence community did not kill Kennedy, it surely made it look that way in its obstruction of his committee’s work.
Garvin quoted various people, including some who said Castro had nothing to do with the crime, but one reference jumped out in its strangeness. He referred to Miamian Gerald Posner as “author of the enormously popular and influential Case Closed, which debunked some of the most popular assassination theories.” Posner’s book, although highly publicized at the time, was itself debunked. In spades. It was a quick, shallow and grossly distorted work. It has been widely reported that the editor who commissioned it had been married to a CIA employee, and not just any employee. She was an assistant to the notorious “spy on spies” – James Angleton, part of the CIA’s disinformation team.
It is thought Posner’s book was timed to offset the impact of Oliver Stone’s film, "JFK." It also appeared around the same time as Fonzi’s The Last Investigation. There’s more to Posner. He has since been accused of plaigarism by, among others, Miami New Times. Posner announced a lawsuit against New Times, but it was never filed. Don’t take my word for it. Check him out on the internet. This is the last person who should have been quoted in a serious piece on the assassination.
One wonders if Glenn Garvin, a veteran reporter, has read any of the stuff that makes 70 percent of Americans believe in a conspiracy. And do the editors of the Herald read? That paper’s failure to do its journalistic duty regarding the assassination is part of a national media disgrace.
Gaeton Fonzi, now living on the Space Coast, takes a day or so to catch up with the Herald. His reaction to Sunday's piece: "Outrageous."
Understatement.
Restaurateur/entertainer John Day likes this one: Irish man walks out of a bar. It’s possible, you know.
Chuck MacNamara wrote for Gold Coast magazine for 40 years. His most recent piece, ironically, was a reflection on the life of former Florida Gov. Claude Kirk, who died in September. Chuck followed him last week. The attached obit from today’s Philadelphia Inquirer mentions that he was lame from polio, a word we rarely hear these days. It happened when Chuck was 16 and a budding track star. He dragged an inert leg around for the last 61 years. Eventually it put him a wheelchair. That handicap did not stop him from working, first at Philadelphia Magazine, and for the last 35 years as a freelancer, often for our Florida magazines.
He was an editor’s dream. His copy was almost always flawless, never an inaccurate statement, rarely even a typo. You could call him on short notice, as we did with the Claude Kirk piece, and ask if he had anything for our Undercurrent section. Days later we got the piece.
Chuck liked a drink. One day at lunch at Bookbinder's across from our office in Philadelphia, he was on his third martini. A companion said, “Chuck, do you realize every time you drink one of those see-thrus you kill 300,000 brain cells?” Chuck reflected briefly, then slowly raised his glass, and, sipping, replied, “I just hope my brain holds on as long as Winston Churchill’s.”
He did not quite make it. But he was close.
***
"MAC NAMARA
CHARLES ‘CHUCK’ Before Google there was Chuck MacNamara. MacNamara, one of the editors who helped pioneer the city magazine concept at Philadelphia Magazine, died Jan. 6, 2012 from heart failure at Morrisville Presbyterian Apartments in Morrisville, Pa. He was known for his extra-ordinary range of knowledge and memory for detail. A 1957 cum laude University of Pennsylvania graduate, he joined Philadelphia Magazine in 1959, and was legendary editor Alan Halpern's right hand man as the magazine grew from an obscure business magazine called Greater Philadelphia Magazine to a publication which won national acclaim in the 1960s. MacNamara wrote entertainingly about often obscure or historic subjects, complementing the work of investigative reporters such as Gaeton Fonzi and Greg Walter. It was MacNamara who introduced his Penn classmate Fonzi to the magazine. He helped invent sections such as ‘Top Docs’ and ‘Best and Worst’ which have since been imitated by hundreds of local magazines. MacNamara was a shareholder in Gold Coast magazine in Fort Lauderdale, Fl. in 1970 when it was bought by his former Philadelphia Magazine colleague Bernard McCormick. After leaving Philadelphia Magazine in the 1970s he wrote numerous articles over the years for Gold Coast and other Florida publications owned by the same company. His most recent piece was in the January issue of Gold Coast. He also wrote an introduction to a soon-to-be-published book on the birth of city magazines in Philadelphia. MacNamara was born in Phila., and lived in Birmingham, Ala. before his family returned to the Lansdowne area. After suffering polio as a teenager, he wore a leg brace for the rest of his life and was confined to a wheel chair in recent years. He is survived by sisters Barbara Lucash of Morrisville and Judith Anderson of Drexel Hill: 3 nephews and a niece and 2 great nieces and a great nephew."
It was about 6:30 in the morning and the sign on Florida’s Turnpike said Fort Lauderdale. It was the year 1959 and we had heard about the place – a spot kids from the north were visiting for spring break. Our La Salle crew annually tuned up in the spring by visiting Florida to race, in separate meets, against Rollins, Tampa and Florida Southern. And then the guys took off for Fort Lauderdale to undo all the health benefits of that exercise. They lived to tell about it and what they told made the town seem like an exciting place. We were headed to Miami but got off the turnpike to check out this famous place.
There was nothing near the turnpike except flat fields. We must have been on Sunrise Boulevard, although the name meant nothing at the time. We drove east, through nothing, for what seemed a long time. We were beginning to wonder if Fort Lauderdale were on the beach, or in the opposite direction, although we knew the ocean lay somewhere to the east and we had the distinct impression that the town was on the ocean. We passed what seemed to be a bar, shaped like a teepee, and maybe a gas station and a few isolated buildings, and then we came to what seemed new housing, then passed a few stores and what looked like the beginnings of a town, and then we we were shocked to behold the Atlantic, glistening blue in the morning sun. We took a right, drove along an empty road, and an empty beach and small hotels, and after what seemed a short drive, the road turned us back the way we came in. This is Fort Lauderdale?
About five years later we came to interview a man in Palm Beach. My publisher and I stayed at the Boca Raton Hotel (as it was then known) and he wanted to visit the Mai-Kai in Fort Lauderdale. We found it outside of town, standing alone among sandy fields. Five years later, when we had moved here to buy Gold Coast magazine, one of the first stories was on the 15th anniversary of the Mai-Kai. It was surrounded by buildings in all directions. We told the owner, Bob Thornton, we had been in his old place. He said there wasn’t any old place. Such was the growth of Fort Lauderdale, and South Florida in general, that when we began hanging out at Nick’s and meeting guys like Bill Thies and Bill Bondurant, we heard them talk, almost nostalgically, about what a great place this had been to grow up in.
Forty years later, we realize that 1970 was practically the ground floor. Construction was everywhere on the beach and half the world seemed to want to be in Florida. We think back now on what had been halcyon years, when Florida and Fort Lauderdale represented the future, fresh and clean and free of big-city problems. Those thoughts take inspiration, the wrong kind, from stories in the media, including one today, about people leaving the state. The papers said young people can’t make a decent living, and are crossing the country for work commensurate with their education and aspirations. And we have known for some time that retirees, whose money for decades has fueled the state’s growth, are often looking elsewhere, ironically to escape the problems of too much growth. Traffic, crime, taxes, crowds, pollution and sometimes chaos – the things they came to Florida to escape.
We have all the big-time stuff, football coaches getting fired, Ponzi schemers galore, politicians indicted, and elements of government which, somewhat insanely, still favor development over quality of life. We see people trying to restore the Everglades to what they used to be, and fighting people who are bent on encroaching farther into the river of grass. With houses and stores empty, they want to build more.
And we think back, a bit sadly, to a time when we looked for what was supposed to be a famous town and learned it was hardly there.
The kid was good. All-State. The problem was that he was from Edmond, Okla., and Oklahoma already had one of the best quarterbacks in the country, and a top recruit who was the heir apparent. Jared Allen wanted a college scholarship and he wanted to play. Somebody mentioned that Florida Atlantic University had a young program and might be interested. His father, Lyndon, had never heard of the school. He asked who was the coach. He heard the name Howard Schnellenberger. “Howard Schnellenberger,” he repeated. He could not believe such a name was coaching at a school he never knew existed. The films were in the mail the same day.
When Howard Schnellenberger saw the kid’s films he did not hesitate. Jared Allen got his scholarship and Florida Atlantic got one of its best players in its 10-year football history. He was a four-year starting quarterback who guided FAU as a Division 1-AA team that beat a Division 1-A team in only its 22nd game. He starred for a team that opened its history playing Slippery Rock and just a few years later was competing against teams from the Big Ten.
At the time Howard Schnellenberger predicted that someday Florida Atlantic would win a national championship, although he never promised to be around to see it. Keep in mind that he was comfortably retired, well into his 60s, when FAU asked him to start a football program from scratch. And when he predicted great things for a new program, people had to respect the man’s opinion. This was a man who worked under Bear Bryant and Don Shula and was offensive coordinator for the only undefeated team in NFL history, who took the Uniersity of Miami, a team that had rarely tasted glory in more than 50 years, to a national championship. And then took over another doormat program, the University of Louisville in his hometown, made them a winning bowl game team and built a new stadium in the process. He said he wanted to do the same thing in Boca Raton. That seemed less far fetched when the Owls tied for the Sun Belt championship after only two seasons in the conference, and began getting invitations, and winning bowl games. By then he was working on a campus stadium. This was for a team that could not draw enough people to fill Lockhart Stadium, and had to schedule big-time opponents on their turf to get a decent pay day.
This year Howard Schnellenberger got his, and FAU’s stadium. It is a jewel of a facility, a petite version of the kind of thing one sees at the most modern professional venues. It took a lot of personal work by the coach to get it built, and one sensed that when it opened this season he knew his time at the school was over. He announced his retirement before the season began.
It would be nice to report that FAU’s brilliant start in football had continued to this day. Alas, the last three seasons have been disappointing, this one especially. There are reasons for that. Success can be its own enemy. Gary Nord, a good offensive coordinator, was hired by Purdue. By playing big-time opponents such as Texas and Michigan State early in the season, the team was almost guaranteed a few losses each year. Schnellenberger, going back to his UM days, liked to recruit in South Florida. But competition today is much tougher. The rise of Central Florida, South Florida and now Florida International as important football progams has made the job of picking up the best of the leftovers more difficult. Schnellenberger has had physical problems. Surely, at 77, he can’t chase talent the way he once did, not and build the stadium at the same time.
He left in early December, as always gracious and with a touch of self-deprecating humor. He has been first in so many ways, for so many years, and his leaving was, in an ironic twist, also a first. He retires, likely this time for good, after three losing seasons, the last one 1-11, the last score 26-0. When was the last time a coach did that and people were still sad, more than sad, to see him go?
The Sun Sentinel reported Sunday that Tri-Rail’s rebuilt station in Pompano Beach will be entirely powered by solar energy. This makes South Florida the nation’s leader in solar-powered commuter train stations – probably because there aren’t any others. The money comes from the federal government – a $5.7 million grant to build a “green” station. A Tri-Rail spokeswoman said this would be the model for stations of the future. The 18-month construction will also put some people to work. It is a good example of government stimulus improving our infrastructure.
We love solar. We even have a solar steering wheel in the car. When you leave it out for a few hours in the August sun, you can’t touch the steering wheel, which is painted black to make sure you scorch your fingers at the slightest touch. We are working now on a steering wheel filled with water, so that if you desire to take a shower in your car, you can count on hot water.
That, of course, is not the concept applicable at the Pompano Beach station. There we expect the use of solar panels which convert sunlight into electricity, enough electricity in this case that it will handle the station's needs and have excess to sell to the electric company.
Joking aside, this is welcome news. This report, and others recently, show a slow but steady trend in South Florida toward the use of renewable energy. We have read about buildings being designed with wind turbines on the roofs, and new designs in wind turbines which seem to hold promise of greater versatility. Instead of large propellers, there is a design shaped somewhat like a football in the kickoff position, only larger. It rotates and can take wind coming from any direction. This is not exactly novel. You can still see old Florida cottages with those little rotaries on the roof that spin in the wind and are designed to draw stale air from below.
The only question we have about the Tri-Rail deal is practical: Why spend a lot of money on a high-tech station that is on the wrong track? It is pretty obvious by now that some, and eventually most Tri-Rail trains are going to be shifted to where they should have been in the first place – from the marginally useful CSX along the I-95 corridor, east to the utilitarian FEC tracks which run through the high-rise business areas where commuters want to go. Amtrak wants to use the FEC, Tri-Rail wants to use the FEC, and most important, the FEC, in a major switch from its position when Tri-Rail opened in 1989, wants passenger trains on its tracks. It is going to happen.
Does it not make sense, in this day of tight government money, to minimize dollars spent on the track that will be less used, in favor of the one which holds promise for the future? Of course it does. It makes as much sense as Gov. Rick Scott accepting all that high-speed rail money (which he rejected) and diverting it to a sensible rail use, such as putting Tri-Rail on the right track. Of course, the rub was that the money was earmarked for high-speed rail. But you could debate the definition of high speed. Most people think 150 mph minimum. But you could argue that 65 mph is high speed. When you compare it to no speed at all.
We are making a St. Kennedy Day resolution. Every time a local media outlet opposes people who believe the murder of President John F. Kennedy, 48 years ago today, was a conspiracy, we are going to challenge that position. It just happened Sunday in the Miami Herald. The paper’s columnist, Glenn Garvin, in reviewing the TV show “JFK: The Lost Bullet” could not resist an editorial comment at the end.
“The forensic evidence that Kennedy was assassinated by Lee Harvey Oswald has always been overwhelming,” wrote Garvin. Later, in his closing graf, he added, “Yet so many Americans – as many as 70 percent, the last time somebody took a poll on the subject - persist in thinking Oswald didn’t do it, that the president was killed by hidden and powerful hands.”
Now we happen to like Glenn Garvin’s stuff. He’s a born cynic, and one of the best newspaper writers in South Florida. But in this case he doesn’t know what he’s writing about. First, the forensic evidence has never been overwhelming. The other way around. It was the glaring contradictions in the Warren Commission’s selective use of evidence which quickly raised challenges to its “lone nut” conclusion. The Commission came up with “the magic bullet” theory because it was the only way to make Oswald the lone shooter. It also ignored dozens of witnesses who saw shots from the grassy knoll in front of the president. Two of those were Kenneth O’Donnell and Dave Powers, members of JFK’s Irish Mafia, who were riding just behind the president. Both had said one shot came from the front, but were persuaded to testify otherwise by the FBI.
Although it was not known at the time, three of the seven Warren Commission members, including Senator Richard Russell of Georgia, had doubts about their report, and did not want to sign it. And this was before researchers began to develop considerable information unknown to the Warren Commission about connections of Oswald to the U.S. intelligence community, and the CIA’s obstruction of the Warren Commission and subsequent government investigations into JFK’s death. It is revealing that Robert Kennedy sensed that connection immediately. Although it was not revealed until recently, one of his first moves after his brother’s death was to meet CIA director John McCone to see what he knew. McCone knew nothing because he was appointed by JFK and therefore out of the loop. It is significant that the previous CIA director, Allen Dulles, who was fired by JFK after the Bay of Pigs fiasco, wound up on the Warren Commission. He never told the Commission vital information, such as plots by the CIA to kill Fidel Castro.
One of the early Warren Commission doubters was highly placed. Senator Richard Schweiker of Pennsylvania looked into Oswald’s background and, convinced that he had “the fingerprints of intelligence all over him,” reopened the investigation in 1975. Gaeton Fonzi had challenged the Warren Commission conclusion in Philadelphia Magazine in 1967 after interviewing Arlen Specter, who was later a U.S. senator. Fonzi was astounded that Specter, who had come up with the magic bullet theory, could not explain it. Schweiker had read that piece and eight years later hired Fonzi as a field investigator based in South Florida. Schweiker suspected a connection between Oswald and the Cuban anti-Castro activities down here. Fonzi found it, and also found that he was constantly impeded by disinformation from CIA connected people like Watergate burglar Frank Sturgis.
Fonzi went on to work for the House Select Committee on Assassinations, generally known as HSCA. He spent five years on the case, and had a major hand in writing its final report. That report said JFK’s death was probably a conspiracy. That may be the reason 70 percent of Americans think it was a conspiracy. The government has admitted it. But it left open the big question. Who conspired? Was it the mob? Castro? The Russians? Political enemies? CIA? All of these?
Fonzi, convinced by his personal experience that the CIA was covering up, was disgusted at the report’s vagueness. He wrote “The Last Investigation” which first appeared in Gold Coast magazine in 1980 as two long articles. Fonzi continued his work privately and published the book in 1993. It was republished, with additional information, in 2008. Fonzi’s work has been cited in virtually every important book on the assassination. They keep coming. Two of the best recently are David Talbot’s Brothers and James W. Douglass' JFK and the Unspeakable. Both books had the benefit of documents slowly being declassified in the national archives, and people coming forward who, out of fear, had been silent for decades. People had good reason to be fearful. A number of would-be witnesses died mysterious deaths. Hale Boggs, a member of the Warren Commission who had begun to express his dissent, was one of them. His airplane disappeared over Alaska. But as the years passed, people began to talk. One of them was a woman who says Oswald suspected in 1963 that he was being set up to take the blame for President Kennedy’s murder.
In total, there is a mountain of evidence supporting the 70 percent of Americans who believe in conspiracy. Glenn Garvin dismisses such people: “They turn away from clarity and embrace the murk…” Perhaps that’s just a good writer’s typo. Maybe he meant to write “They turn away from disinformation and embrace clarity.”
Chris Matthews’ new book about President John F. Kennedy, Jack Kennedy: Elusive Hero presents some fresh insights, often told in the words of others, on aspects of the late president’s life that are not generally appreciated.
For instance, at the time he ran to become the youngest president in history, opponents criticized him for lack of experience. Yet he was running against a man, Richard Nixon, who had entered Congress at the same time he did. And while Nixon had been vice president under President Eisenhower, Kennedy had been in the Senate, as least as valuable a training ground. More important, he had been around the world from his teenage years, had direct contact as a young man with some of the more important figures of his time, been a hero in a shooting war, seen death of friends, and was well read on history. Most important, he may have been the most intelligent and thoughtful president of the 20th century. He was too thoughtful for his own good; perhaps that’s what got him killed.
Observing these things almost 50 years after his death is the value of Matthews’ book. It is particularly timely in view of the quality of people now aspiring to become our next president. It is laughable to contrast a man who saw Winston Churchill at work and read his books with enthusiasm, to people who don’t know what state in which the American Revolution began; will sign a pledge not to raise taxes when they have no concept of the consequences of such a vow; and argue to do away with federal agencies they can’t even remember, and seem to have no idea why they want them eliminated in the first place.
Of the Republicans running, only Jon Huntsman and Newt Gingrich seem to have knowledge of history and world affairs remotely comparable to JFK. Gingrich knows history, at least Civil War history. He wrote a book in which the South wins the battle of Gettysburg, but it wins it not at Gettysburg, but closer to Emmitsburg, 10 miles south. It was achieved by doing what Gen. James Longstreet had urged on Robert E. Lee – going around the Union right flank and cutting off the enemy supply line, forcing the Union to launch a disastrous attack. That is the kind of book JFK would have read. Sarah Palin could not find Pennsylvania on a map. Michele Bachmann doesn’t know Massachusetts from New Hampshire. Although they do look a bit alike.
Back to the more recent past. Matthews is particularly good at presenting insights from JFK’s letters, diaries, conversations and speeches early in his career which reveal his vision of the future and the challenges which he later faced as president.
Shortly after World War II, having been wounded and lost friends and family members, he wrote to a friend: “The war makes less sense to me now than it ever made and that was little enough – and I would really like – as my life’s goal – in some way at home or at some time to do something to help prevent another.”
In London, working as a journalist before the atomic bomb was used, he wrote in a diary about war: “The clash may be finally and indefinitely postponed by the eventual discovery of a weapon so horrible that it will truthfully mean the abolishment of all the nations that employ it. Thus science, which has contributed to much of the horror of war, will still be the means of bringing it to an end."
After visiting the Far East in 1951 he made a speech: “You can never defeat the Communist movement in Indochina until you get the support of the natives, and you won’t get the support of the natives as long as they feel that the French are fighting the Communists in order to hold their power there.”
JFK tried to understand the other side. As the Cold War heated up, he even had sympathy for Russia, noting its terrible history of invasions by European powers. He wrote a piece that ended: “the heritage of 25 years of distrust between Russia and the rest of the world that cannot be overcome completely for a good many years.”
This is pretty remarkable stuff for a man who many remember for his fondness for women, none of who ever accused him of sexual harassment. But Matthews puts it all together in describing the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 when, against the advice of almost all advisers, he refused to invade Cuba. He thought that could set off the horror of a nuclear war. Instead he blockaded Cuba from Soviet ships and quietly, through established back channels, made a deal with the Russians not to invade Cuba and to take missiles out of Turkey which threatened Russia, just as the Cuban missiles did the United States.
He may have saved the world, but many in our government did not think so at the time. They wanted a confrontation with Russia, nuclear or not, and hated JFK for avoiding it. They thought him a coward and traitor. Shortly thereafter he paid the price.
The scary Tri-Rail accident yesterday, in which a car burst into flames around the train after it was struck at a crossing, is just the latest of many such accidents on South Florida’s outdated railroads. The tracks themselves are not outdated. Both sets of tracks on the CSX and FEC are first class; it is where they cross roads that makes both railroads archaic systems.
Where tracks in most northern cities were either elevated or depressed to eliminate grade crossings a century ago, Florida has let cities expand all along the tracks without dealing with the hazard that the crossings present. You can go from New York to Washington without finding more than a few such crossings. They were almost all eliminated back in the days when horse-drawn carriages, rather than trucks and cars, were using the roads which intersected railroads. That’s the reason Amtrak can run trains at 150 miles an hour. Here you are lucky to go a half mile without a grade crossing, each one an accident waiting to happen.
It could be worse. When I-95 was built parallel to the CSX tracks, grade crossings on the busiest crossroads were eliminated. But some still exist, and with Amtrak and Tri-Rail running trains that exceed 70 miles per hour through highly populated neighborhoods, serious accidents are inevitable. The papers ran the score card today. From 2005 to August 2011, there were 170 grade crossing accidents in the three-county area. Forty-one people were killed, 58 injured.
Now it could get worse, much worse. Tri-Rail is sensibly trying to move some of its trains from the CSX route to the much more useful FEC, whose tracks hit the downtowns where most commuters work. Ridership should take off. But you can expect accidents to also increase. There are enough now on the FEC with freight trains lumbering along at 35 miles an hour. Much faster, and more frequent commuter trains will cause more, and possibly much more, serious accidents.
Thanks to the I-95 rebuild years back, Tri-Rail presently has only a handful of dangerous crossings in Broward, such as the one at Commercial Boulevard in yesterday’s crash. In contrast the FEC has dozens, including all the busy east-west highways from Oakland Park Boulevard south to Hollywood. If the service is switched, trains will probably not be able to go faster than 50 mph. That’s still a big improvement over no service at all, but to reach its potential Tri-Rail (and Amtrak might switch as well) would require an extensive rebuild of the FEC.
It does not have to be done all at once. Some crossings could simply be closed, but eventually the busy roads have to bridge the tracks. And in the longer run, the entire FEC, all the way to Jacksonville, needs to get what northern railroads got a century ago. Costly, sure. But think of the jobs. And it should be considered an investment, rather than a stimulus, in which a fast, convenient commuter service will return the money in economic development near the stations.
