Tri-Rail
commuter rail service in South Florida

Tri-Rail (reporting mark TRCX) is a commuter rail service linking Miami, Fort Lauderdale and West Palm Beach in Florida, United States. The Tri prefix in the name refers to the three counties served by the railroad: Palm Beach, Broward, and Miami-Dade. Tri-Rail is managed by the South Florida Regional Transportation Authority (SFRTA) along CSX Transportation's former Miami Subdivision; the line is now wholly owned by the Florida Department of Transportation. The 80-mile-long (128.7 km) system has 19 stations along the Southeast Florida coast, and connects directly to Amtrak at numerous stations, to Metrorail at the Metrorail Transfer station, Miami Airport station, and MiamiCentral, and to Brightline at MiamiCentral.
In 2025, the line had a ridership of 4,924,100, or about 13,400 per weekday as of the second quarter of 2026.
A second Tri-Rail line on the Florida East Coast Railway corridor, dubbed the "Coastal Link", has been proposed. The line would operate between Toney Penna station in Jupiter and MiamiCentral in Downtown Miami, and add commuter rail service between the downtown areas of cities between West Palm Beach and Miami. Combined with the existing Tri-Rail line, this expanded Tri-Rail system is estimated to have a daily passenger ridership of almost 30,000; or approximately 9 million passengers per annum, doubling Tri-Rail's current ridership.
History
1920s: Seaboard–All Florida Railway
The line on which Tri-Rail operates was built by the Seaboard–All Florida Railway (a subsidiary of the Seaboard Air Line Railroad) for intercity passenger rail service in the early 1920s. The line was inaugurated on January 7, 1927.
The public source identifies “Tri-Rail” as commuter rail service in South Florida. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Tri-Rail, commuter and rail.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 4, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q2452212. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 2025, 2026 and 1927.
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This entry incorporates text from “Tri-Rail” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.