Amtrak’s new Acela trains, called NextGen, are four years late arriving for passengers on the Boston-New York-Washington route, but still most Amtrak passengers on the Northeast Corridor (NEC) will never be able to use them. That can and must change and Amtrak should deploy the 28 new trainsets for all riders on their busiest line instead of the second class service they offer the vast majority of their own customers on the Corridor.
Amtrak only carries about 5% of the passengers on the Corridor, the other 95% are on the commuter lines run by the states, like Metro-North, LIRR and NJTransit, as well as MBTA in Boston, SEPTA in Philly and MARC in Maryland. And among Amtrak’s passengers, the 3,238,130 who took Acela in fiscal year 2024 were only 23% of the total on the NEC, the other 77% are on the Northeast Regional trains, suffering on the ancient Amfleet cars, the oldest of which have just had their 50th birthday.
The first Amfleets debuted on Aug. 5, 1975 and the rest were rolled out during the next two years. The Acelas, now being retired, began service in the last days of 2000. So the Acelas are too old, but Amtrak is for now keeping three-fourths of their NEC riders on trains that are twice as old.
How old? Well, consider that the Federal Railroad Administration forbids the use of freight cars that are more than 40-years-old, although a waiver can be obtained to use them up to age 50 (the FRA has just proposed a new rule lifting the 50-year cap on freight cars). And while freight cars haul cargo like coal or lumber at an average speed of less than 25 mph — and never more than 60 mph — Amfleet transports human cargo at speeds up to 125 mph on the NEC.
Amtrak also very wrongly treats non-Acela trains running on the NEC as second class. We took a Regional from New York to Boston a few weeks ago. We left Penn Station about 30 minutes late, but had made up most of the time by Providence, having had the usually very fast stops at all the stations along the way to quickly let people off and on. But at Providence we sat. And sat. At some point an Acela that was behind us entered on the track on the other side of our platform. It unloaded and loaded and then departed, overtaking us while we waited. And we got to Boston quite late, thanks to that Acela.
Ever since the Metroliner, Amtrak has run two separate kinds of service on the NEC. Regular (Regional), which has coach and business class and fancy (Metroliner/Aclea/NextGen), which has business class and first class.
No other transportation company in the world does it this way. On airlines, there are no regular planes and fancy planes. An airliner will have differently priced classes of coach, business and first, but all on the same aircraft. Everyone on that plane has the same trip, with differences in the comfort and size of the seat and other amenities like food and drink.
The same for cruise ships and ocean liners. From steerage to first class, everyone is riding on the same vessel, arriving at port at the same time. And that is also how it works on every other railroad in the world but for Amtrak.
A private outfit called AmeriStarRail is smartly proposing that all trains on the NEC run using the NextGen and the Amfleet be immediately mothballed. Amtrak’s plan to replace the Amfleet with new trainsets by Siemens Mobility would instead be used on the national network outside the NEC where trains run slower than 80 mph.
AmeriStarRail says that they can do this more efficiently than Amtrak. Under their idea, every NEC train would run at the same high speed and every NEC train would run using the same equipment. Instead of one NextGen each hour and one Regional/Amfleet each hour, there would be two NextGens every hour. AmeriStarRail would also have a nonstop from New York to D.C. making the trip in less than two hours without charging more.
Taxpayers have paid a lot for these new NextGens, so every passenger should be able to use them, not less than a quarter of the riders on the NEC.
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