According to the Biden administration, the bipartisan infrastructure bill represents the largest investment in passenger rail in this country since Congress created Amtrak in 1970.
And it’s easy to see where the bill’s priorities lie in passenger rail when you compare two administration announcements from late 2023: $16.4 billion for the Northeast Corridor between Boston and Washington versus $8.2 billion for the rest of the country.
This discrepancy is understandable when you consider that the Northeast Corridor carries more than half a million passengers each weekday, while Amtrak nationwide carries just over 60,000 trips per day.
And yet many people love the trains that occasionally run on routes far from the Northeast Corridor.
Nathan Udall had to travel from Los Angeles to Oakland for a family reunion, so he did what relatively few West Coast travelers would do: He booked a train ticket.
“When you think about what you do on vacation, that’s pretty much it. You want to see as much as possible and have as much comfort as possible,” he said.
I found him in the observation car, photographing the views as they zoomed by. He says he feels more relaxed on an Amtrak train than on a cramped airplane.
“That’s why the train is my favorite means of transport.”
His fellow passengers included two sisters who said the train offered the cheapest fare to visit their uncle in Eugene, a grandmother from Spokane who was pleased with Amtrak’s claim that the train had a much smaller carbon footprint, and a woman on her way to Seattle to visit an old college friend who cannot travel by plane because of his fear of heights.
What they all have in common is that they have enough time.
The Coast Starlight route goes from Los Angeles to Seattle. My trip from LA to Portland takes about 30 hours if everything goes on time. By plane, the same route takes less than 2.5 hours.
And yet, train tickets are regularly sold out in summer.
“Today I looked at the trip and said, ‘There’s something wrong with Amtrak,'” said Ed Leska.
He lives outside of Santa Barbara and has been working as a National Park Service volunteer on this route since 1998. He informs passengers about interesting places along the route. “I’ll get home on time. When you see that, you say: No way.”
Amtrak declined to comment for this story, but its website says that the Coast Starlight — which has average punctuality — has 58% of passengers arriving on time. That reality hit home on day two, when we woke up to find we’d been delayed an hour overnight. And often, it’s not Amtrak’s fault.
“They share the tracks with the freight railroads,” said passenger Lois Kaminsky. “They lease the tracks, but they belong to the freight railroads. And that’s why they release the tracks.”
Sometimes we had to stop to let the freight trains pass. Also, many of these rail lines have a speed limit of 79. Electrified rail lines are faster and less polluting. One of the few is the Northeast Corridor line that Amtrak owns for the most part from Boston to New York and DC.
The bipartisan infrastructure bill represents the largest investment in Amtrak’s history. Most of the money is earmarked for the Northeast Corridor, where Amtrak does more business than any other line. The owners of the other 97 percent of rail lines borrowed by Amtrak have no incentive to invest in electrification.
Amtrak’s leisurely pace is one reason the company has never made a profit in its 53-year history.
“I don’t think that’s a very useful metric for understanding any kind of transportation network,” said Sean Jeans-Gail, vice president of policy at the nonprofit Rail Passengers Association. He’s a Portlander who lives along the route and says highways aren’t profitable. The same goes for airports, the post office or most public transportation.
“It’s a utility, not something that is viewed as a profit center in our society. It’s something that allows people to go about their business,” he said.
In addition, an Amtrak conductor told me, there are many small towns along the railroad lines where Amtrak is the only stop. Jeans-Gail said keeping these lines is a matter of equity.
“If you divest from passenger rail, you leave many smaller communities behind,” he said.
Thanks to more than $20 billion from the bipartisan infrastructure bill, upgrades to trains and stations are underway. The hope is that Amtrak can return to pre-pandemic ridership, which was closest to breakeven levels.
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