America's national railway firm, founded in 1971. It is the country's primary inter-city passenger rail operator.
The Northeast Corridor (NEC), running between Boston and Washington, DC, is the only part of the network fully owned by Amtrak. It carries 43% of the firm's passengers, runs frequently and is the most comfortable way to travel between city centres in the north-east. If future historians had nothing but Amtrak data to understand America, a government rail expert has joked, they would assume everyone lived in or around New York City.
The flagship service is the Acela, which runs on the NEC. A "next-gen" Acela launched in 2025, capable in theory of 160mph using tilting technology, though neither the tilt nor the higher speed has yet been activated. The new trains can carry 25% more passengers than the old ones.
In the nine months to July 2025, 28.6m people took an Amtrak train, a 6% increase on the same period a year earlier. The firm is on track to record the most journeys in its 54-year history. Fare revenue grew by 11% in the year to June 2025.
The bipartisan infrastructure law signed by Joe Biden in 2021 flooded Amtrak with money. Capital spending has risen more than threefold since 2019, to $4.5bn. Construction has started on a new tunnel in Baltimore to replace a 150-year-old one where trains must slow to 30mph. A tunnel under the Hudson river in New York remains a much bigger bottleneck.
Two new routes were initiated in 2024-25: Chicago to Minneapolis and New Orleans to Mobile, Alabama. Both have sold far more tickets than expected. New diesel-electric hybrid trains are being purchased for routes outside the NEC.
Amtrak's record of finishing investment projects on time and on budget is patchy.
Sources: The Economist, September 27th 2025
What fools these morals be!