As the old saying goes, “Measure twice, cut once.” For the new Miami train station under construction, they did the opposite: Measure once, cut twice:
FDOT engineers and consultants blame Amtrak, the federal passenger rail agency, for the design mistake, which means that platforms at the new station will be as much as 200 feet too short to accommodate some of the long trains the service sometimes uses on its Miami routes. Amtrak runs those long trains to Miami up to twice a day during the winter tourism season.
FDOT says Amtrak failed to tell the agency of those longer trains and raised no issues with platform length during extensive design-plan reviews that preceded the start of construction in May 2011 — something Amtrak denies.
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So, I uh, could have told them this when I saw the construction pictures 2 years ago?
Honestly, the whole setup there is idiotic. They have the mainline rail tracks through a crossing to at-grade platforms, the Orange Line platforms cross over the mainline tracks to a station at level +1, and the vertical circulation over that. Even ignoring the grade crossing issue it’s probably the most expensive and least useful (for passengers) situation imaginable.