Amtrak gets a new – but slow - fleet

Hurrah, but only one cheer not three.

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Amtrak is getting a fleet of great new trains. Hurrah, but only one cheer not three. That’s because, great as the new trains sound, Amtrak will still not be able to call itself a high speed railway.

The new trains are definitely an improvement on the old fleet. Amtrak has ordered 83 Airo trains for a total of $8 billion, the largest fleet replacement since the company was founded in 1971. The trains are being assembled at factories in Sacramento and North Carolina, but they are essentially a German design by Siemens.

Andrea Sachs from the Washington Post, was given a ‘sneak preview’ and could not contain her excitement. ‘The train feels more spacious and filled with light, thanks to taller ceilings and large panoramic windows. Travelers can enjoy a full of view of the passing landscape, not the truncated scenery of the old bifurcated window design’ Each six car train will have

317 seats with 72 in each coach car and 50 in business class and it is ‘the small, thoughtful touches that really shine. The tray table components intuit a traveler’s ever-changing wants and needs. You can pull out the small shelf and watch a movie on your gadget, accompanied by a beverage stored between sips in a separate cup holder. For a meal and a movie, you can employ the full tray plus the ledge with a latch that holds a tablet in place. A personal light attached to the seat keeps the cone of illumination on you and not slumbering passengers’.

It all sounds like an improvement on the Amtrak trains I have travelled on in the past, but high speed it is not. The new trains will first be introduced in the Northwest where they will run between Oregon and British Columbia, but sadly they still cannot be considered high speed as they run at a maximum of 125 mph – compared with 186 mph on most of the world’s high speed railways – and even that lower maximum will only be reached on relatively short stretches.

While China now has 30,000 miles of high speed line, built since 2008, this begs the question of why America is yet to join the club. Possibly this may happen in the mid 2030s if the California project, whose funding is still uncertain, is completed but the US will never boast a network like those in China, Japan, France and Spain and some 20 other countries across the world

This begs the question as to why America does not have a high speed railway. As I write in my forthcoming book, Fast Track, to be published in June, there were attempts by Lyndon Johnson to actually create a high speed network across America as he had been so impressed by the world’s first high speed railway, the Shinkansen in Japan. However, despite funding being allocated for drawing up the scheme and a new train being introduce on the Northeast corridor, the idea foundered once Johnson had departed.

Somehow, American and high speed trains were not a good fit. In his 2015 book on high speed railways, The Second Age of Rail, Murray Hughes, listed half a dozen reasons why rail projects have struggled in the United States and it is difficult to dispute his reasoning. Probably the most important aspect is that America – and Americans - do not have any real concept of what intercity rail travel is like. Yes, there is something of a rail network in the Northeast corridor but it is not only the slowness of the trains that are a barrier to its use. The stations are poorly connected with other public transport services, and therefore people need to use their cars to access the trains which some people will simply think they might as well use the car for the whole journey?

But there a deeper reason why passenger rail services have not flourished in the US since the car and the plane all but wiped them out in the post war decades. Hughes suggests that there is a fundamental hostility from Americans towards railways, possible a feeling stretching back to the time when they were a misbehaving monopoly. Recently, this antipathy has been exacerbated by the move right of the Republican party who seem to view railways as some kind of socialist plot

I would add, too, that the aviation, oil and auto industries, and their lobbies, are always at hand to undermine any major rail or public transit project. This confrontational political climate is hardly conducive to the kind of long-term planning and financial commitment which are essential to bring railway projects to a successful conclusion. As I reveal in my book, the most economic and efficient schemes have been produced in countries like Japan, France and Spain where there is a consensus that high speed railways are a necessary and there is support from across the political spectrum.

Yet, in the US, there is such a divide over the issue that rail projects such as the new tunnel under the Hudson river and the California high speed line have been hampered by the stop-go nature of federal funding which is so dependent on the attitude of the person in the White House. Therefore, I wish Amtrak’s new trains well, and I hope they help grow the market, but in truth America’s hostility to passenger rail means that even if the occasional scheme does eventually see the light of day, the nation will never boast a high speed network – and that is its loss, environmentally and economically.

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*Also consider joining me : The South Eastern Railway – A journey through the past, present and future Wednesday 11th March 6:45 PM at One Birdcage Walk London. Join us for a special event to celebrate the proud history of the railway in London and the south east. Buy tickets here https://tinyurl.com/24d2ch4