Amtrak Envisions 84-Minute Trains Between NYC and Boston, in 30 Years
So about America's lagging train travel network and service? Yea, Amtrak has a plan. In Philly yesterday, Amtrak unveiled their 40-year plan for increased routes and high-speed trains, called "A Vision for High-Speed Rail in the Northeast Corridor." The gist of it is that, if the country can spend $117 billion to get this plan completed, then in 2040, we'll have faster trains and new tracks to enable passengers to travel between NYC and DC in 96 minutes and NYC and Boston in 84 minutes.
Those same routes, operated now on the relatively higher speed Acela trains, take 167 minutes and 230 minutes, respectively. The question now isn't whether or not the country needs this, but whether or not train travel in the US can afford/survive the billions in spending and the 30 more years of waiting before anything like this even comes close to being rideable.
The goals, aside from quick travel time, are ambitious enough to seem promising; Amtrak estimates that between 18-80 million passengers annually would take the service in the first years, while pumping $900 million in operation revenue into the system, which hopefully also created 120,000 jobs. It sounds nice and we'd love to see it happen, but we simply can't ignore the voices in our head saying that the train systems of Europe and Asia are already far more advanced than what we want to have in the USA thirty years from now.
Read the whole Amtrak plan here.
[Amtrak train car photo: Jaunted]
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