Riding The Rails

 

By Mark Howell

 

Yours truly, author of this column, once collaborated on a series of stories with Mark A. Praught of Cudjoe Key on what might be the one true salvation for the Florida Keys and its people.

 

 

The way Praught first described it, the scheme involves a 21st Century transportation system that could carry large quantities of earth and materials to mitigate the impending sea-level problem —as well as be a robust tax base-generator and even a tourist attraction in its own right.

 

 

He has become convinced that the idea is the closest thing to a mythic panacea for the Keys and its problems of the future:

 

 

Higher taxes; lost of natural habitat and wild inhabitants; declining property values and increasing cost of living; increasing hurricane vulnerabilities and a solution to the death toll on Florida’s deadliest per-mile highway in Florida (that’s the 129 miles of US1 in the Keys), not to mention how many carbon-belching trucks that would be removed from the highway.

 

 

Also it could help counter the trend toward joint use military bases. The U.S. Navy may one day abandon Key West for Homestead as fast as it has already left Roosevelt Roads in Puerto Rico. Idea would also cope with the Cuba problem when that nation opens up and the Keys’ only highway becomes as crammed as a parking lot, just as 60 miles of it was solid bumper-to-bumper the other way on Memorial Day weekend.

 

 

The panacea being proposed is an elevated, 300-mph, high-speed “Maglev” (magnetic levitation) monorail system such as the Shanghai Maglev, which is the 8th iteration of Transrapid’s train system of a near-silent and almost maintenance-free railroad system.

 

 

Capable of one-hour trips with a half dozen stops from Key West International Airport to Miami International Airport, it would overcome the fact that our airport’s runways are a mere three feet above high tide while all other South Florida airports (including Marathon) are 6-plus feet above sea level. Key West’s airport will be the first to drown in tomorrow’s sea-level rise.

 

 

Last year, then-Mayor of Monroe County George Nugent and Congressman Joe Garcia got a 10-minute spiel on all this from Mark Praught and, he reported, “They had the look of deer paralyzed by the headlights of a car.” Joe was apparently interested in the Cuba angle and in the next Mariel boatlift scenario. George voiced an interest in a dining car until Mark pointed out that the Maglev is so fast you’d only have time for a coffee and doughnut before it was time to get off the train.

 

 

Both politicians asked how much? Mark revealed that previous Miami-to-Orlando Maglev studies had calculated a cost of $26 million per mile.

 

 

With revenue bolstered by world publicityfrom completion of phase one alone (Stock Island to Marathon Airport), a Maglev could fund itself even before completion.

 

 

Interesting, they said. This before Mark even mentioned that Transrapid has designed freight-train and earth-transporting hopper-type rolling stock that could assist in bringing in the hard-core materials that are the only true solution to sea-level rise.

 

 

The obstacle to full acceptance of such a breakthrough is, naturally, the human tendency to pay little heed of warning signs of disaster until it is too late.

 

 

In fast-motion disasters such as hurricanes, tornadoes, earthquakes, floods, mudslides, forest fires and so on, people will say to themselves, “This can’t be happening.” In slow-moving disasters, the situation goes unnoticed until it’s too late.

 

 

Today’s Keys culture “really started taking shape with Henry Flagler‘s Overseas Railway,” says Praught. The next step, he insists, is to replace today’s highway with a new kind of railroad whose technology already exists.

 

 

In the process of spending more than10 years researching all his, Praught has managed to accumulate an impressive collection of studies, computer files, notebooks, maps, papers and DVDs, which he now offers to anyone who shares his concerns.

 

 

He is not, he tells us, going to take them with him to his new home in New Mexico, where sea-level rise is not anticipated.

 

 

Mark A. Praught can be contacted at 1224 Rogers Lane, Cudjoe Key, FL 33042. Tel. (305) 744-0220.

 

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