I am off to Toronto next week where I will be doing a report on the madcap scheme by the Ontario premier to take out all the cycle lanes, to make more space for cars. So it is not only south of the border that crazy things are happening.
But a trip to North America reminds me of the experiences I had with Amtrak when writing my book The Great Railway Revolution. I spent a couple of weeks going around the whole country by rail. It was in many ways a depressing experience. Most of the trains operate once a day and provide nothing like a comprehensive rail service. They are the vestiges of a once great system that spanned the whole country.
I am struck by how it could have been different. I am currently writing a book about high speed rial across the world and visited China earlier this year which was an extraordinary experience. China has built 30000 miles of high speed rail in the past two decades, essentially superimposing a whole new network on this vast nation. As pointed out in a a long recent article in The Nation America could have done the same. The article quotes rail advocate Jim Matthews, the president of the Rail Passengers Association as saying: ‘If the United States had likewise invested in Amtrak over the past two decades it would likely have a world-class high-speed rail network reaching every corner of our country’. It is a good point. Imagine if the US had a series of fast trains linking its major cities, carrying millions of people who no longer had to drive or fly. It would be a very different nation. Matthews acknowledges that this would have require subsidy because rail systems are not profitable if the cost of building them is taken into account. But then neither are roads which are heavily subsidised. America made a choice in building the Interstates and starving the railroads of funds.
Essentially America started closing down its passenger services in the immediate postwar period because they got in the way of freight. Eventually, the system was so pared down and under threat from the freight companies that the US was forced to nationalise the passenger rail network as Amtrak (originally called Railpax until a previous company of that name complained). But its ambitions were always limited and it only really provided a proper European style train service in the northeast corridor.
And here there is a bit of good news, sort of. The first five sets of Amtrak’s new Acela fleet ha vebelatedly entered service after years of delay as originally they should have started running in 2021. These are great trains built by Alstom and capable of up to 260 km/h except that that they will rarely be able to get up to that speed because neither the track nor the lay out can cope with that speed. There are far too many crossings with roads and the track has too many curves and speed restrictions which means that the new trains will not really save much time on their predecessors. The trains do offer an increase in capacity of around a quarter as they can accommodate more people which will be welcome, but they are not a game changer despite the $2.3bn which they have cost. Therefore while the trains will be roomier and there will be more seats, the service will essentially be the same.
Amtrak is under threat from the Trump administration which is hostile to public transport. Already federal funding for the high speed train project in California has been cut and now Amtrak faces a battle to keep its subsidies for existing services. So far, despite Trump’s clearly stated antipathy to railways a bit contrast to ‘Amtrak Joe’ Biden, Amtrak’s budget for 2026 has been maintained. And last year there was a 15 per cent increase in ridership which has helped its finances. Indeed, the recent spate of air crashes in the United States has pushed many people – apparently there are 25 million people in the US who refuse to fly – to using the trains. Nevertheless, these are uncertain times for Amtrak at a time when their shiny new trains are a sign of what could have been….