Amtrak works best on two routes: the Northeast Corridor between Richmond, Virginia, and Boston, Massachusetts, and the car train between DC and Florida, where they’ll bring your automobile so that you have it at your destination.

I just looked at ticket prices on the Northeast Corridor. The very popular DC to NYC route is between $25 and $55 per way if purchased at least 2 months in advance, depending on the popularity of a particular time. A plane ticket would be probably $150-$350.

Plus the actual seat experience is akin to business class on an airplane, so maybe the better comparison is $400-$1000 for the equivalent airplane.

But that’s basically the only route where downtown to downtown is faster than airplanes (because both DC’s and NYC’s train stations are in a much more convenient walkable/transit friendly location than their airports).

Oh, and children under 12 can travel at 50% fare and still take a full seat. So for families, the train might be much cheaper.

Then again, passenger rail is a disaster for the other 85% of U.S. residents who don’t live in the Northeast.

Depends on where you are. There are areas on the northeast corridor that (if bought in advance enough) are a pretty good deal. The other major thing is that in some instances you’re going from center city to center city, meaning no transportation to/from the airports.

That being said, it’s no guarantee the train will be cheaper.

Yes, like the post office majority republican fascists have worked diligently to kill it. One result of that is the high price.

An airplane trip across Canada is $200 (almost - yvr-yhz) , and you’re pressed in like cattle for 8 hours.

A rail trip across Canada is $18,000, and you’re lucky if you’re in a little stateroom for 7 days of a 14-day trip because the bulk seating is torture.

That matches the last time I checked as well. A cross country basic ticket was the same cost as a plane ticket, but if I wanted anything more than a basic chair then the price quickly skyrocketed.

I didn’t see that in the article, though they did talk about electric outlets at every seat

Amtrak’s Coast Starlight line on the west coast has wifi, but it’s unusably glitchy. The trips I’ve taken haven’t been crowded, so I doubt it was an overuse issue. My guess is either the upstream connection is junk or the trains aren’t kitted out with hardware capable of meaningful QoS (either from misconfiguration or inability).

All someone has to do is tell Trump that Biden likes Amtrak and these will all disappear

US air travel is a fucking joke[;] it’s getting to where I’d rather take a train.

yeah. Can you imagine a rolling capsule hotel? Go to bed in Bakersfield and wake up outside of Newark as the train slows for your stop? “bing-bong… your stop, SEC-AU-CUS, is in 30 minutes. Please …_bzzt…check your bags and ensure you have everything with you when you leave. _pchkt!”

I’d rather fly since I will actually get there most of time on time.

Amtrak is broken by default, having to yield to commerical traffic means they never will have a sane schedule.

Step inside the sprawling factory in California where the largest fleet replacement in Amtrak’s 55-year history is coming together piece by piece.

By Gabe Castro-Root

Visuals by Ruth Fremson

Reporting from the Siemens Mobility plant in Sacramento

Feb. 13, 2026

In the sleepy, car-centric outer reaches of Sacramento, across the street from low-slung homes and behind an unassuming wooden fence, the next generation of American passenger rail is taking shape.

Workers zip around in golf carts at the 60-acre, 2,500-employee Siemens Mobility plant, a behemoth complex of cavernous warehouses and towering machinery that at peak production can turn out a train car every day. Over the last few months, amid the rows and rows of rail cars in various stages of production, the newest Amtrak trains have finally begun rolling onto the tracks.

Airo, Amtrak’s name for its new arrivals, is set to bring the railroad company out of the 1970s and ’80s, when much of its current equipment was built. While early missteps slowed production and added costs, Airo trains will soon replace a painfully outdated fleet that lacks many modern conveniences and has become increasingly difficult to maintain.

Airo trains aren’t high speed — with an upper limit of 125 miles per hour, they’re not any faster than those they’ll supplant. But the new rail cars feature sleek interiors, grab-and-go food options and accessible designs for people with disabilities. Passengers will start to see Airo trains this summer on the Cascades route, in the Pacific Northwest, followed by more than a dozen East Coast routes beginning next year, including the Northeast Regional, the Carolinian, the Pennsylvanian and the Vermonter.

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 will be built over the next several years at the Sacramento plant, which also makes light-rail and intercity trains for other customers, and at another factory in North Carolina.

“We’re jumping about 50 years into the future,” said Derek Maier, a senior director of Amtrak’s Airo program. “It’s a more open experience. It’s better lit. It’s newer materials.”

When I visited the Sacramento plant with the photographer Ruth Fremson late last year, the first Airo train had been sent off for testing and the second was nearing completion.

Each train includes more than 3,500 parts manufactured by nearly 100 suppliers across 31 states. Assembling each one is like solving a supersize puzzle.

The process begins in the harness room, where the train’s wiring — more than 30 miles of it in each passenger car — is labeled, cut and connected. It’s then laid out and checked by hand to ensure each wire will be properly attached and secured in the train. About 140 technicians work here across three daily shifts.

Switch cabinets, which house the train’s electrical controls, are also built here.

In another building nearby, metalworkers weld the carbon steel frame of the train’s locomotive.

Passenger cars, made of stainless steel, are built in an area called the coach weld. Automated machinery performs 30,000 spot welds per car.

Ruth and I, along with our tour guides, wore safety vests, hard hats and goggles throughout our visit. We added ear protection in the welding areas, where loud noise is a regular part of the job.

The train’s wheels — and the gears, wires, brakes and springs that support them — come together in the bogie assembly. A bogie is essentially one unit of all those parts. A coach car’s bogie wheelset weighs more than 4,200 pounds, and a locomotive bogie wheelset weighs more than 7,200.

Airo’s 4,200-horsepower locomotive brings a long-anticipated feature to the rails: Unlike earlier models, it can change from diesel to electric at the flip of a switch, and some variants can even run on battery power. These capabilities will lower emissions and save time for travelers passing through Washington, D.C., where trains going between the electrified Northeast Corridor and the non-electrified network to the south must currently wait to switch locomotives.

Amtrak is a joke,

Yes.

It’s shameful we don’t have a modern high speed rail network in the US.

Again, true.

and Biden should have done more about it when he had the chance.

Yeah, I’m in agreement with @NOT_RICK in that Biden was stymied by popular opinion and richbitch protest to not spend on things like infrastructure because he was too busy dumping money into the disaster-du-jour caused by chronic insufficient investment in infrastructure and healthcare … again, prevented by richbitch politicos reframing everything as "taking money out of the hands of the middle class for some boondoggle like heathcare. “Who in Louisiana or North Dakota even USES I-5, anyway?” and similar bad-faith arguments.

Wouldn’t the president need congress to appropriate money for that? What would you have liked him to do?