When discussing the future of intercity rail in North America, one of the common questions advocates face from a skeptical public is whether a suggested train route is viable. Often it sounds more like ‘well who would ride this thing anyways?’ but what people are really asking is, ‘does investing in this make sense relative to the alternatives?’ The days when passenger rail was the only travel option have long passed, and while in other nations the passenger train has reestablished itself as a competitive transportation mode, this is not so in the United States. Despite being practically built around railroads, Americans have lost the regular experience of train travel in daily life. Hence, the question of whether people would ‘really ride this thing?’ always needs answering.

Luckily, this was addressed by the USDOT way back when they were putting together Railpax, later Amtrak, in 1970. Secretary of Transportation John Volpe provided a report for the ever-skeptical President Nixon outlining a basic network split between two types of trains: long-distance overnight trains, once-per-day, connecting key regional endpoints and short-distance trains, twice per day, serving intercity corridors.

It’s the latter which bears further discussion today.

Volpe and his department explained on the second page of their memorandum that “The corridor designation applies to a pair of cities each with a population of one million or more and less than 300 miles apart.”1 There were other filters as well:

Corridor routes were selected if the demand projected for 1975 was sufficient to permit trains to compete effectively with buses on a time basis and airplanes on a cost basis. The demand was forecast by either (1) projecting existing demand or (2) using a demand model developed in the Northeast Corridor Study2 for cases where existing demand has been artificially depressed by poor rail service.

Using the above, the USDOT identified the following city pairs that fit the criteria and had existing corridor service.

When the public got ahold of the proposed basic system, they were appalled. Out of the hundreds of trains still operating, only 27 routes were to be saved, of which 14 were to be long-distance overnight trains. A more substantial network was eventually salvaged in the face of public pressure heading into the 1972 elections, resulting in a mostly recognizable version of the Amtrak we all know today.

What we must note is the USDOT’s criteria for viable corridors:

1. City pairs of around 1 million people each within 300 miles

2. Time competitive with a bus

3. Cost competitive with an airline

There were more city pairs fulfilling these criteria in 1970 than were chosen for the basic system, since the USDOT excluded routes which had no remaining corridor trains. At the time there were 57 possible pairings, with 25 selected for service and a further 7 accessible with a single transfer.3

If there were 57 viable corridors in 1970, how many are there today? By analyzing the 2020 US Census Metropolitan Statistical Areas (MSA’s) and their Canadian equivalents, we can reconstruct a modern version of Volpe’s map.

For the sake of accuracy, the following corridors were excluded:

1. Short-haul commuter service

2. Routes crossing physical barriers

3. Routes lacking a direct rail connection

4. Routes entirely within Canada

There are 198 city pairs that qualify today.

Quite a few pairs have existing rail service, with nine overlapping to form the Northeast Corridor. A further forty-six pairs have 2+ trains per day, including long-distance service. Nine cities have convenient single transfers that effectively connect them, such as Albany – Philadelphia. This leaves thirty-two pairs with inadequate service, fewer than two trains per day and often at odd hours of the night. A staggering 101 city pairs have no service at all!

A map of population density with these pairs overlaid reveals a critical lack of routes where millions more people live today than in 1970. Many cities with no service, such as Nashville and Cincinnati, should be thriving hubs of activity at the crossroads where many routes come together.

This visualizes something that rail advocates hear all the time: “I’d love to take the train, but it doesn’t go where I need to, when I need it.” We agree! Decades of underinvestment in our passenger rail system have left vast swathes of the country behind, especially MSAs, which have grown dramatically since 1970.

One can easily trace a future ‘Southeast Corridor’ over the S-Line from Washington and Richmond to Raleigh, Greensboro, Charlotte, Greenville, and Atlanta. Others belong to trains long discontinued, such as the original Floridian, or pre-Amtrak trains such as the ghost of the Cincinnatian from Detroit to Cincinnati or the Buffalo Day Express from Buffalo to Washington, D.C. via Harrisburg.

Not all corridors are created equal. Buffalo to Washington, D.C. covers 191 miles as the crow flies, but the two endpoints together only have 7,621,377 people in their MSA’s connected by winding freight tracks through rural Pennsylvania. By contrast, Houston – Austin has 10,525,572 within 145 miles along a mostly straight route. This analysis was not meant to determine which pairs were the most realistic, a question for another day.

This brings us to the largest unaddressed question: Which of these routes are time competitive with an intercity bus? In 1970, with uncongested highways, the answer was ‘not many’. Today, America is choked with traffic and getting worse by the year.

Very soon, the most direct highway routes for intercity buses between most cities in America will be so congested that even with current track conditions, a passenger train would be time competitive with them. As plane tickets grow more expensive, short-haul flight schedules grow more sparse, and as more buses and cars sit in traffic for hours, the need for a realistic alternative will only grow.

Only our rail system has the capacity to keep America moving.

There is a certain irony in the fact that the same USDOT that was actively planning and building the interstate highways as a comprehensive national network in the 1970’s did not do so for Amtrak. In the eyes of the USDOT, highways were being built for the future and passenger rail was a salvage job stuck in the past. The consequences of that distinction have never been clearer.

The Corridor ID program and the FRA Long Distance Study are signs, very encouraging ones worth celebrating, that the USDOT is beginning to recognize the scale of the challenge facing us. These are the first tentative steps toward building the rail system we need. Yet even if every route being studied today were fully implemented, it wouldn’t bring two trains per day to every city pair analyzed in this post.

We need to start thinking bigger.

This is why the question of viability is frustrating, because while trains from Tulsa – Oklahoma City or Buffalo – Pittsburgh would perform well, there are no plans to implement such services. Occasionally one of these corridors gets brought up by well-meaning local officials, only for them to be flooded with questions about viability. When we built the interstate system, nobody demanded that we separately study every new mile of pavement. Why do we need to do so for trains?

America deserves a proper rail network, useful and available to every American nationwide, not just on a handful of legacy routes. We’ll only get there if we break free of the mindset that investments in other modes of transit are common goods, but America’s national railroad must prove itself over and over, just as it did fifty years ago. The demand existed then, and it certainly exists today; the question is whether our nation will invest properly and build for the future. The alternative is to be stuck in traffic for another half century.

“We know ridership and revenues are breaking records each year, but so many online naysayers say Amtrak is artificially limiting supply of seats by keeping rolling stock out of service, so those records don’t mean much. The Horizons (which Amtrak has been relatively quiet about timelines on returning to service) are part of it. It’s also cars sitting in Beech Grove, the Superliners being used on the Illinois routes, the “insert route here” running with only 1 or 2 coaches. I’ve heard it all. The question is: can we find out how many passenger seats were available 10 or 20 years ago compared to this year? At least on average?”

We absolutely can compare seat availability over the last decade. But when we do, it turns out there’s way more to the story than what the online naysayers suggest. If there is room to criticize Amtrak, it’s not that they’re under-utilising their rolling stock, but that they’ve taken so long to acquire enough rolling stock to meet passenger demand. Let’s look at the data.

The Load Factor Story

The clearest evidence that Amtrak is not withholding capacity, is found in the divergence in load factor between Northeast Corridor, state-supported, and Long-Distance routes over the last decade. Load factor, or passenger-miles divided by seat-miles, represents what percentage of the seats on a vehicle, route, or network are full. The below chart shows how load factor varies across the Amtrak system.

Before COVID, the long-distance network and NEC had broadly similar average load factors around 55-60%, while those on state-supported routes were significantly lower at around 40%. Since COVID, the state-supported and long-distance routes have experienced similar ridership recovery, gradually returning to their pre-COVID levels by 2024-2025. For a time during the height of the pandemic in FY2021, the NEC ran at a lower load factor than the National Network or even the average pre-COVID state-supported route. But the NEC’s load factors sharply rebounded in 2022 and have continued to rise ever since. Now, could that be because Amtrak has artificially reduced the number of seats on the NEC? No, because the data shows the opposite: from FY2016 to FY2025, the number of seat-miles Amtrak ran on the NEC increased from ~3.5 billion to ~4.0 billion. The only logical interpretation is that demand on the NEC is surging, which lines up with what those of us who regularly ride it can attest: for every early-morning or late-night train with nearly half the seats vacant, there will be a peak-time or mid-day train with standing room only.

But load factors also vary widely within service lines. On the National Network in FY 2025, the Sunset Limited had an average load factor of 41% while the Coast Starlight ran at 65%. Among state-supported corridors, the Borealis was at 72% while the Ethan Allen (on the portion of the route North of Albany at least) had only 21%. To answer questions about equipment utilization, it therefore makes the most sense to examine individual routes using specific equipment types that have at times been unavailable for Amtrak’s use. Let’s consider the Horizon cars, which have been out of service since March of last year due to corrosion, and are only just now being reintroduced.

The Horizon Story

In the decade prior to the Horizon cars’ withdrawal, the Amtrak routes which use them saw broadly similar patterns of COVID-driven ridership decline followed by recovery to previous norms. A few routes experienced post-COVID load factor spikes, like the Downeaster and Pere Marquette in 2023, but similar one-year variations have occurred on individual routes pre-COVID, as on the Missouri River Runner in 2018-2019. The most notable individual data point is on the Borealis, which began service in 2024 with the highest load factor of any state-supported route and has only gotten busier since then.

Because the Horizons were withdrawn just over halfway through FY2025, we won’t have an annualized comparison of load factors before and after their withdrawal until the full FY2026 data are published in a few months. But these annualized data still provide a route-by-route baseline to contextualize Amtrak’s monthly performance data, which are available at the time of the withdrawal in March-April 2025 and precisely one year later in March-April 2026. As shown in the table below, seat miles and ridership both declined sharply on every route in the month following the Horizons’ withdrawal, and even with replacement equipment they still had not fully recovered on many routes one year later.

The loss of available seats due to removal of the Horizon cars in March 2025 underscores how much pressure is on Amtrak’s fleet capacity. The impact of losing the Horizon cars has been mostly mitigated by transferring Superliner coaches from the National Network to trains like the Borealis and the Illinois Routes, and Amfleet Is from the Northeast to the Downeaster and Cascades. But the Superliner fleet had itself been partially out-of-service through 2024, and the Amfleets’ availability is constrained due to their sheer age. At the same time, train cancelations on the Northeast Corridor due to construction projects have driven load factors higher when seat miles temporarily declined, even as year-round seat miles have increased. These higher load factors may give the impression that Amtrak is operating more efficiently, but is that actually the case?

The Borealis Story

Let’s examine the route with the highest load factor across Amtrak’s system, to see what it can tell us about running trains efficiently. The data for the Borealis in Amtrak’s archive of monthly performance reports is tabulated below.

But we have to be careful when interpreting data which measures different quantities (e.g. dollars vs. percentages) and magnitudes (e.g. thousands of riders versus millions of passenger miles). So let’s normalize the data: we divide each data point by the average over the period the data covers. A value of 1 thus represents the average for that variable, higher values are above-average, and lower values are below-average. If you’re familiar with Sabermetrics in baseball, this is like converting a stat like OPS to OPS+: we’re translating how well a player (or train) performs in absolute terms, to how well that player (train) performs relative to the whole league (service period). While we’re at it, let’s also graph the data to more easily visualize any trends, and add some correlation coefficients to gauge the significance of those trends.

The left graph shows two relationships you’d expect. Load factor increases when passenger miles increase or when seat miles decrease. And the ridership trend more closely follows passenger miles rather than seat miles. But even though load factor is mathematically calculated from passenger miles and seat miles, the correlations between these variables are statistically weak. What that tells us is, ridership changes based on many more factors than just how full the train is. For example, there’s a large seasonal ridership drop after the November-December holiday travel surge, but not a comparably large drop in load factor. Moreover, the month-to-month increase in load factor associated with the Horizon fleet’s withdrawal is small relative to changes in other times of year. If anything, the loss of the Horizons appears to have been most acutely felt over a drawn-out period during the following summer months. Still, these data give us a benchmark for how to interpret significance: if a variable is more strongly correlated with load factor than the two variables load factor is calculated from, then that variable probably matters!

The center graph shows the relationship between load factor and the route’s finances. The first thing that stands out is that operating costs are pretty consistent year-round, and completely uncorrelated with load factor. That makes sense when you consider that a train’s operating costs are mostly fixed to running the train regardless of the number of cars or available seats. Meanwhile, the fare recovery trend closely follows ticket sales, which also makes sense if operating costs are fixed. But notably, there isn’t a strong relationship between any of these financial indicators and load factor. If Amtrak was really constraining seats to artificially inflate their prices, you’d expect to see a stronger correlation between load factor and ticket revenue. Instead, not only has removing the Horizon cars on routes like the Borealis done little to reduce operating costs, it seems to have also capped revenues.

But how does all this impact the passenger? The right graph breaks out the route’s costs and revenue by passenger mile and seat mile, and what it shows is incredibly revealing. On the cost side, higher load factors weakly correlate with lower costs per passenger mile, but significantly correlate with higher costs per seat mile. In other words, Amtrak is paying the same fixed operating costs to move fewer seats, but not to move more passengers. On the revenue side, higher load factors have an extremely strong relationship with revenue per seat mile, but are completely uncorrelated to revenue per passenger mile. And in case it’s not obvious, “revenue per passenger mile” has another name: ticket price. What that means is stark: during a rolling stock shortage, Amtrak is faced with having to bring in more revenue per seat to cover its costs, but asking passengers to pay more for their journeys doesn’t help them do so.

The capacity crunch is therefore also a financial crunch, a slow bleed of lost ticket sales acting as a sea anchor to Amtrak’s budget. Every rider who cannot book a ticket on a sold-out train is incremental revenue lost. If, as some people claim, Amtrak could “just put the Horizon cars back in service” to sell more tickets, surely they would do so? Instead, we’re looking at signs of a system under immense pressure without any slack left to accommodate it. When trains on peak days at peak hours are selling out all available seats, that is a signal that demand outstrips supply.

These data point to a conclusion which rail advocates have understood for a long time but often struggle to articulate: service cuts do not lead to better financial outcomes.

The Fix? Build More Trains!

Amtrak might not be able to cut its way to better outcomes, but it certainly can grow into them by expanding its fleet capacity. Amtrak’s fleet strategy for the next 15 years indicates they are well aware of the potential and planning to reach it at an unprecedented scale.1

With the news on August 14^th that more Airo trainsets will be procured for the Midwest routes, nearly the entire Amtrak network will shift from a capacity deficit to a capacity surplus. Even in the few situations where the new trains are shorter in length than those they replace, they will have more seats available. Simply having more trainsets, implying some routes could see increased frequencies as well, should also boost ridership independently of seat count: travelers are more likely to take the train when the timetable gives them more options. Further proof that Amtrak is pivoting toward major growth comes with the recent announcement of a ‘System Expansion Committee’, which could help prioritize where to assign current and new equipment for maximum impact. And in the nearer term, as reported two weeks ago, Amtrak and Canadian National have finally found a way to better allocate equipment on CN-hosted routes that’s compatible with CN’s track circuit systems.

While this strategy for corridor services is a good sign, the elephant in the room remains Amtrak’s planned Long Distance Fleet Replacement (LDFR). The National Network of long-distance trains has elevated load factors, rapidly aging equipment, and sells out during peak travel times. But as with the corridor services, Amtrak’s fleet expansion plans are explicitly providing the capacity for future service expansions. We’ll take a closer look at what those plans could entail in the next installment from The Data Junction.

TRB’s Annual Meeting, held January 10–14, is one of the transportation research community’s premier gatherings, bringing together thousands of researchers, practitioners, policymakers, and industry professionals from around the world. The Transportation Research Board is part of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, the private, nonprofit institutions that provide independent analysis and advice on science, engineering, medicine, and public policy.

The Rail Passengers paper describes a new station-level ridership model developed by our research team, which is part of your professional staff here at the Association. Led by Dr. John Christoph, the other team members as co-authors on the paper are Eric Siegel, Jordan Hyatt, Andrew Bohrer, Nolan Buonomano, Joe Aiello, and Tanner Cutler.

Rather than simply asking where existing riders travel, the model examines how much ridership a station and its surrounding market should be capable of generating. It builds data-derived station catchment areas and considers factors including population and demographics, service frequency, destinations served, and connections to other routes.

The team tested dozens of potential variables, using statistical techniques to identify the factors that best explain observed passenger behavior. In validation testing, the resulting model achieved a correlation of roughly 0.85 with actual ridership, with average prediction error of about 32 percent.

The work represents the latest step in a years-long Rail Passengers effort to build better tools for understanding the potential of proposed passenger-rail services, tools we are already putting to work in studies around the country.

Having that work selected for presentation at TRB is also a welcome recognition of something we’re especially proud of: Rail Passengers isn’t just making the case for more and better passenger trains. Our Research & Analysis team is developing original tools and methods to help planners, policymakers, and communities understand where those trains can succeed.

Congratulations to the entire team! We look forward to sharing their work with the transportation research community in January.

So I was intrigued in April while en route to a weekend music festival in Lancaster, PA. I’m not a regular on the Keystone Service and have historically thought of it as basically the same kind of service as the Northeast Regional, but the vibes were totally different as I found a seat and the train pulled out of 30^th Street. The staff were the friendliest I’ve ever encountered, even more so than the Virginia-based crews I’m familiar with from trips home. Rather than scanning my ticket with a silent acknowledgment or a curt “welcome aboard,” the conductor asked “Hi, how are you today?” in a tone that conveyed not just customer service training, but genuinely high morale.

Our first stop in Ardmore gave me insight into one possible reason. The conductor’s announcement over the intercom concluded with gleeful enthusiasm: “all doors will open, repeat: ALL DOORS WILL OPEN AT ARDMORE.” Then, as he walked through the car to collect passengers’ ticket slips, an elderly couple seated ahead of me asked if they could get some help down the steps. To which the conductor broke out into a big grin and said “oh don’t worry, they’ve just completed the new high-level platforms, you won’t need to step down.” I could tell he anticipated the couple’s reaction (“Oh my goodness that’s wonderful!”) by his crisply-rehearsed reply: “Yep, they’ve almost finished the new ones at Coatesville, too. Next it’ll be Downingtown and Parkesburg’s turn, and after that every station on the line will be fully accessible!”

The memory of that interaction rattled around my mind in the subsequent weeks. Occasionally it bounced off a couple other thoughts: budget fights in Harrisburg over PennDOT and SEPTA funding, the UP-NS merger application, and the reaction I get when I tell a fellow traveller that I work for the Rail Passengers Association. So at my next opportunity to ride the Keystone in June, I decided to take a closer look. What’s the status of these projects? How visible is the progress on the ground, compared to what the PennDOT website proclaims? What has the Pennsylvania taxpayer gained for the investment their representatives have made?

Recently Completed:

First and most obvious, when I got to 30^th Street, I noticed that the scaffolding that had been up in the main hall for so many months had finally come down! The cleaned and repaired ceiling looks gorgeous!

Ardmore is the Keystone’s first stop westbound from Philly, but unfortunately on this trip my train passed through Ardmore without stopping. Even at line speed the just-finished platforms looked obviously brand-new.

Still-Like-New:

As the train continued east, it occurred to me that beyond Ardmore I wasn’t entirely sure what I would be looking for. Arriving in Paoli, the platform looked new-ish, albeit with some chipped paint here and there, but the pedestrian bridge is unmistakably fresh brick and clean windows. When we got to Exton, the Eastbound platform on the opposite side looked nearly as new as the one at Ardmore. A similar story when we stopped at Mount Joy further down the line. The project website somewhat surprised me that all of those improvements had been completed back in 2019-2020; for being seven years old, they still look in great shape. It’s clear they were built to last.

Elizabethtown is where one would expect to see how well these improvements will age, because it was the first station along the line where work was completed. The station building was renovated back in 2011, a new parking lot and multi-use path finished in 2015, and the most recent feature is a parking payment system which became operational in February. But even 15 years out, the facilities still feel fresh. The entrances on both sides of the tracks look almost-new, the pedestrian access is holding up well against the elements, the bathrooms are clean, the wooden benches are comfortable, the water fountain works, the elevators up to the platforms are smooth, and the platforms themselves have held up well. The parking lot is, well, a parking lot. Overall, even without looking too hard you get a visual sense that these improvements aren’t just one-and-done projects to paper over more glaring defects, but serious investments in the line’s future.

Visibly In-Progress:

I can become irrationally happy when I see active work happening on a construction site, so Coatesville was a treat. The current station sits on a curve, which is only suitable for low-level platforms. Therefore PennDOT is building an entirely new station, one block East of the old one, where straight track allows high-level platforms. The train’s deceleration provided a nice long look at the improvements: concrete ties replacing wooden ones under the tracks, the new platforms’ concrete surfaces cured and painted, the new canopies just about completely installed, and workers actively installing fixtures like lampposts and signage.

Then the old station comes into view, and you immediately understand why these investments are such a priority. The original station buildings are not just closed, but boarded up and visibly deteriorating. The low-level platform is crisscrossed by a spiderweb of cracks patched with tar. The characteristic trackside stair-step blocks look more like tripping hazards than accessibility aids.

Lancaster is one of my favorite stations anywhere in the Amtrak system. It’s not my home station, but the wide above-track concourse with wooden benches, cream-painted walls, brass fittings, and history displays make it feel like home - like Baltimore Penn, but a bit more cozy. As such, on my previous trip in April I somehow totally missed the ongoing construction work extending that concourse over the Westbound tracks to the parking lot on the North side, and on this trip I resolved to keep my eyes open for it.

What fascinated me was that the visible construction at Lancaster is significantly further along than what the pictures on the PennDOT website show. Foundation work North of the tracks has been finished for a few months, but by now the steel frames of the elevator shaft and stairwell have reached the level of the concourse. Inside, the construction area is kept discreet by a set of temporary panels at the far end. Even though there isn’t a completion date listed on the website, the visible pace of progress suggests it won’t be long.

Still-to-Come:

Downingtown will be getting a similar treatment to Coatesville, with a brand-new station a half-mile East of the existing site, both to accommodate high-level platforms away from a curve and to improve road and pedestrian connections across the Main Line. Preliminary construction activities were supposed to have begun only a couple weeks before my trip, with utility relocations and modifications to the overhead wires being staged at the new station site. It’s a little hard to tell where those activities are occurring unless you know where to look, but you can’t miss the old station – much like Coatesville, it clearly needs an upgrade.

Parkesburg will be the last station to receive its makeover, which is still in the preliminary design phase, and thus construction activity isn’t yet visible. What did stand out is the comparison between the eastbound and westbound platforms on each leg of the trip. As rough as the old station building looks on the eastbound track, the canopy on the westbound track somehow looks in even worse shape.

Over the Horizon:

I didn’t make it far enough to see any of the projects PennDOT categorizes as "Keystone West" which in any case are all beyond the Keystone Service’s terminus in Harrisburg but should enable additional frequencies on the Pennsylvanian. Regardless of their construction status, those improvements are noticeable. The UP-NS merger application specifically cites many of those same PennDOT investments when claiming that the old Pennsylvania Railroad Main Line will soon have enough capacity for up to 8 new freight trains every day between Harrisburg and Pittsburgh. I’ve raised this question in conversations about our Association’s position and strategy around the merger: should we be ok with NS describing public improvements intended for passenger rail, as a capacity benefit for their freight trains? Is NS merely joining the general public in celebrating the benefits that Pennsylvania’s investments in rail have brought to the whole Commonwealth? Or are they admitting that their negotiations with PennDOT over these projects were really about getting a state government and its taxpayers to subsidize their capital expenses to the tune of billions of dollars?

The Stark Contrast - SEPTA:

At stations where the Keystone doesn’t stop, for the most part conditions look little better than the old facilities at Downingtown, Coatesville, and Parkesburg…maybe even worse. It’s hard to tell as we pass by at line speed. But it’s telling in light of the budget battles in Harrisburg in recent years: Amtrak (and maybe NS) gets upgrades, while SEPTA gets cuts, and that contrast is highly visible to the passenger.

But the contrast is also visible elsewhere. I spent the evening before my trip on the Keystone visiting friends in Germantown, a neighborhood in the Northwest part of Philly. On my walk from the SEPTA station, I was surprised to see yard signs for the Chestnut Hill Community Association, which read simply “Save the Train.” It was too dark to get a picture, but visiting their website, you’ll find op-eds, letters, and sample comments from 2023 and 2024 opposing cuts on the Chestnut Hill East and West Lines, encouraging folks to offer comments at public meetings, and celebrating each victory that has kept the service running each year. But what struck me is that this isn’t a dedicated rail advocacy org. It’s a neighborhood association, a group of ordinary citizens who care about their community enough to engage in the democratic process to fight for it. Their attitude to trains is the same as their attitude toward parks or community centers or other civic infrastructure: even if they don’t use it every day, they are glad it exists, and they want to see it perform the best that it can.

When I’m not riding a train, and I tell someone I work for the Rail Passengers Association, they always pepper me with questions about Amtrak, but maybe not the questions my fellow rail advocates might expect. Far from complaining about the current service or lamenting the demise of trains long past, they always ask about the future: when they can expect new trains, or how long we’ll be stuck with trains constrained by the freight railroads. The general public, even those who don’t regularly ride Amtrak, seems to understand Amtrak’s situation better than we often give them credit for.

I don’t want to make too much of a distinction between rail advocates and the general public. It is certainly true that many of us are more interested in trains than most people, and our opinions can at times seem arcane or in-the-weeds. But every so often we find ourselves singing the same tune as regular folks, when the state of our passenger rail system becomes a visible issue. Whether we’re celebrating the impact of major investments, or fighting the good fight to keep service alive, that visibility matters. It distills all our arguments into a simple, salient point: Americans want better train service, and when they can see the impact of that service for themselves, that builds momentum to keep progress rolling.