Amtrak is launching a new express train between New York and Washington DC that could help it steal even more passengers from airlines in the Northeast
- Amtrak is launching a non-stop Acela Express service between New York and Washington D.C. starting this fall.
- The new trains will run once per day, starting September 23, and tickets are already on sale.
- We spoke to Roger Harris, Amtrak's head of marketing, about how difficult it was to add new trains on the most crowded stretch of rail infrastructure in the entire country.
Amtrak on Thursday announced a new, non-stop express service between New York and Washington D.C. with no intermediate stops.
The special Acela Express will run once per day in each direction beginning on September 23, the railroad said, making the trip in just two hours and 35 minutes. That's nearly a half hour quicker than the other 32 Acelas that run between the cities each day.
Roger Harris, Amtrak's chief marketing officer, said the new trains are only a sliver of what the national railroad hopes to offer in the future as new trainsets arrive and infrastructure upgrades are finished. But it wasn't easy.
"It was a big feat to get the train time to do this," Harris said in an interview with Business Insider. "We had to go through an entire internal exercise to make sure that we had train time available to add these two extra trains, because we didn't have an extra train sitting around doing nothing."
The Northeast Corridor, which runs from Boston through New York and into Washington D.C. is the busiest travel route in the country. On Amtrak alone, nearly 12 million passengers traveled the densely populated route - that's more than currently make the journey by plane, a mark Amtrak first passed back in 2014.
"If you look at door, Manhattan to downtown D.C., we are faster than the airlines when you consider getting to and from the airport and security," Harris said, noting that Amtrak's baggage policies are also significantly more liberal than air carriers. An even shorter train could help those passengers who are already on the fence, stick to the train instead of flying.
"We count in our customer base here business customers, like lobbyists and consultants," Harris continued, "but there are definitely vacationers who take advantage of our advanced purchase products, who have more money to spend and want to get there faster."
In 2021, when Amtrak's shiny new Acela train-sets arrive, Harris says the company might begin to look at more special services as part of a long term investment in both infrastructure and service. But that only depends on the ability for Amtrak - along with the other transportation agencies that manage track along the corridor - to successfully complete badly needed improvement projects.
The hundred-year-old tunnels beneath the Hudson River, for example, are in bad need of repair. Experts estimate a tunnel failure there, just outside New York's Penn Station, could be catastrophic. Other crucial pain points Harris pointed out include a dilapidated tunnel in Baltimore, and a railroad bridge in New Jersey, all of which could cripple travel in the Northeast.
"We're going to have a big increase in the number of trains we have and that will allow us to do more of these nonstop services," he said, "as well as allowing us to add frequencies on the north end between New York and Boston."
More Amtrak news:
- The rise and fall of Amtrak, which has been losing money since 1971
- I spent 23 hours on an Amtrak train from Orlando to New York - and it was a roller-coaster experience with extreme highs and lows