Brightline declared bankruptcy Thursday, then declared Friday morning its trains will keep rolling.
The parent company and affiliates of Brightline, whose Miami-to-Orlando line includes stops in West Palm Beach and Boca Raton, filed for bankruptcy in federal court.
Despite struggling to pay off billions of dollars in debt, the company said late Thursday night it had secured an additional $490 million in loans. Brightline claimed in its news release it was "significantly reducing debt," but did not specify how. About $4.4 billion in debt the company took out over the years will not be changed, the company's news release said.
Brightline's rail service will keep rolling, the company said Friday morning. Passenger tickets are still good, and bankruptcy
proceedings are not stopping train operations, the company said.
Credit rating agencies have been warning since late 2025 that Brightline would default on debt by early 2027, even as ridership grew by hundreds of thousands each year. Ratings agencies had regularly downgraded the company's bonds to grades CC and CCC, junk bond status.
Brightline asked creditors more than a dozen times this year so far to grant the company extensions on its monthly debt payments.
Brightline has never turned a profit since rolling out in 2018, despite growing ridership into the millions.
The rail line lost more than $233 million in 2025, and an additional $54 million during the first three months of 2026, despite conducting more than 2.3 million passenger trips over the past year, a record amount for the train, company reports show.
The privately held company is required to publicly report its financials because the debts it took out came through tax-exempt municipal bonds issued by the Florida Development Finance Corporation, created in 1993 by Florida's government.
Federal, state and local governments have spent more than $543.5 million on Brightline since its 2018 launch upgrading or building tracks, buying new passenger cars, installing barriers and AI software to dissuade track-crossers, researching an extension to Tampa Bay, and constructing train stations.
The money includes a $56.5 million Federal Railroad Administration grant awarded in August to build a Space Coast station in the city of Cocoa in Brevard County.
CEO Patrick Goddard said in 2025 that those government grants did not benefit Brightline directly, but the public at large.
Ex-Brightline conductor Darren Brown sued the company in December for $60 million for the trauma and pain he said he endured from train crashes and being repeatedly ordered to examine the bodies of people killed in the collisions. That federal case is pending.
Brightline has never been found liable for any fatal crash along the rail line's 235-mile corridor. Rising ridership indicates the collisions have not dissuaded passengers.
Email news tips and article ideas to Chris Persaud at cpersaud@pbpost.com.
This article originally appeared on Palm Beach Post: "Business as usual," Brightline says after declaring bankruptcy
