Herzog Contracting completed Brightline’s 129-mile track connecting West Palm Beach in South Florida to Cocoa and Orlando International Airport in Central Florida in just 46 months, working within a century-old right-of-way to construct a second mainline where Brightline’s trains can reach speeds up to 125 miles per hour.

Teams safely moved 400,000 cu yd of earth, laying more than 400,000 ties underneath 456,000 ft of continuous welded rail. HSR introduced a system using an identification card with a live QR code, allowing real-time access to employees’ training records and verification of compliance with safety requirements. Field crews and workers used a cloud-based system to review work plans, document safety talks and log thousands of safety observations and inspections. Safety leadership then analyzed data, found trends and made needed changes to minimize risks.

The COVID-19 pandemic created another safety wrinkle for the project as state and federal protocols altered construction operations overnight for the project, which broke ground in October 2019 and completed in September 2023. With the project already broken into segments, Herzog further divided the project into quasi-autonomous crews that worked in “bubbles” to minimize the spread of the virus.

With more than 4.7 million worker hours, the project saw an OSHA recordable incident rate of 1.14 and lost-time accident rate of 0.21.