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 on August 28th 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
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