‘Someday’...is Today

In Seattle today, Amtrak opened the first of six heavy maintenance facilities

I had the great pleasure today of helping cut the ribbon on Amtrak’s brand-new, 100,000-square-foot maintenance facility in Seattle, built to support the new Airo trainsets.

And standing there, looking around at what we’ve built, I couldn’t help thinking about how long we’ve waited for days like this.

For decades, we’ve talked about the trains we could have. The service we should have. The investments we ought to be making. We’ve commissioned studies, drawn up plans, published reports, and admired artists’ renderings of what passenger rail in America might someday look like.

Well, someday is today.

Thanks to the bipartisan Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, I’ve been lucky enough to attend quite a few celebrations like this lately. New trains entering service. Tunnels being rebuilt. New maintenance facilities breaking ground or opening their doors. Real projects, delivering real benefits, for real passengers.

And here’s the important takeaway: We know how to do this. Amtrak delivered this project on time, $50 million under budget (yes, that’s right), and incredibly, over 400,000 construction work hours without a single reportable worker safety incident.

We know how to build trains. We know how to build the shops that maintain them. We know how to rebuild bridges and tunnels. And we know how to reconnect communities that have waited decades for their trains to return.

But none of this happens by magic. It takes factories, suppliers, skilled workers, engineers, and construction crews. It takes years to rebuild an industrial base that we’ve neglected for far too long. And once we’ve rebuilt that capacity, we can’t simply switch it off and expect it to be there when we need it again.

As I told the crowd today, Congressional appropriations buy projects. But certainty builds an industry.

That’s the challenge ahead. A new Congress will soon arrive in Washington, and we’ll be working hard to ensure that the next surface transportation bill sustains the momentum we’ve worked so hard to build. More trains. More routes. More communities connected to the national network.

Today’s ribbon-cutting was a celebration, and rightly so. But it was also a reminder that we’re just getting started.

America can build great things. We just have to want to build great things.