Photo: Katherine Frey/The Washington Post via Getty Images
Amtrak’s new fleet of high-speed Acelas is one of the largest public transit investments ever made in the country, at about $2 billion. But for the past three years, as each of the 28 new Acela trains rolled off the assembly line in Hornell, N.Y., they’ve languished in a rail yard, all dressed up for nowhere on the Northern Corridor. where to go Now, the Acela’s big refresh, once slated for 2021, may not be underway until 2024.
The Wall Street Journal reports that the new Acela cars are held back by requirements that require the trains to operate in a range of real-world conditions before boarding passengers. The problem is that, unlike their brethren in other countries that have their own dedicated rights-of-way, the new Acela trains, like all services operated by Amtrak, must share tracks with existing freight and passenger trains, greatly limiting the available route. to try And one of the main concerns about the new rolling stock is how it will navigate those antiquated 100-year-old rails, including how trains designed for France’s straight TGV routes negotiate our trickier stretches. (The answer: slowly.) Right now, Amtrak is still using computer modeling to replicate various scenarios the new cars might encounter on their trips up and down the East Coast; so far, supposedly super-fast trains haven’t seen speeds above 90 mph.
Veteran commuters will recall that similar problems derailed the delivery of the first Acela fleet — cracks in the brakes temporarily put 20 Bombardier trains out of service — but Amtrak’s current problems are more infrastructural. And, in a way, more existential. As the federal government grapples with demands to speed up passenger rail service across the country, conflicts with freight-dominated tracks, including growing threats of deferred maintenance and dangerous derailments, will only become more pronounced . Other countries are building trains that exceed 200 mph, as well as the dedicated infrastructure to keep them blurring between cities on schedule; When these new Acela trains start rolling, they will barely qualify as high-speed rail. The promise of Andy “Train Daddy” Byford, who recently worked magic for the MTA, to take over Amtrak’s high-speed network could finally bring about the American rail revolution we deserve. But with every year, we fall further behind.
