is on track to break even in the next fiscal year, despite what some passengers see as declining service and not to mention ever-rising fees.has built a successful train between Miami and West Palm Beach, with grand plans to connect Disney World by 2022.
The 57-year-old is the largest investor in Brightline, soon to be branded as Virgin Trains, with help from media mogul turned travel investor Sir Richard Branson. His other bets include a 2014 purchase of the Milwaukee Bucks, currently a top-seeded Finals team, British soccer club Aston Villa, which is also on a 10-win hot streak in its race to make it back to the upper Premier League, and even a professional "League of Legends" franchise.
The original Florida East Coast Railway linked the many of Henry Flagler's opulent Florida hotels with major American cities on the East Coast."I want to build a train station people want to get married in," Edens said, drawing inspiration from London's St. Pancras Eurostar terminal, housed in a grand Victorian building that's part luxury hotel.
Edens and other Virgin Trains stakeholders visited dozens of city pairs comparable to Virgin Trains' market across Europe as part of their research. In the most successful cases, train services between two major cities in other parts of the world are able to carry more than a quarter of total travel between the two. Virgin Trains has first set its sights on a much smaller "capture rate" of five percent, something Edens says "does not sound like a terribly aspirational goal."Passengers enjoy the BrightLine passenger train's inaugural trip from Miami to West Palm Beach on May 11, 2018 in Miami, Florida.