After years of delays and disputes over safety and design, Amtrak is one step closer to bringing new high-speed trains to the busy Northeast Corridor.
Amtrak officials said Friday night that the new trains, which had failed an extended series of computer modeling tests, had passed on the 14th attempt and had been cleared by the Federal Railroad Administration to begin testing in the roads that go from Washington, DC, to Boston.
The faster, more spacious trains (sets of locomotives plus passenger cars) are priced at around $1.6 billion and will replace those in Acela's fleet, which should have been decommissioned at the end of their life cycle in 2016.
The sleek new red, white and blue Avelia Liberty trains will travel at a top speed of about 160 miles per hour due to a limit imposed by the former Northeast Corridor tracks, 10 miles faster than the current Acela trains, and are expected to they bow for a faster and smoother ride when cornering. They have capacity for 386 passengers, an increase of 25 percent.
The track testing will be “the next step in the safety certification process leading to the launch of profitable service,” Amtrak said in a statement.
Cliff Cole, a spokesman for Alstom, the French manufacturer of the new trains, hailed the move to on-track testing as progress for passengers “who will soon discover an entirely new travel experience on America's busiest rail corridor.”
But the project, three years behind schedule, has been plagued by major setbacks, and Amtrak has not said when the trains will be ready for passengers. Last fall, passenger rail service was targeting October 2024 for the new trains to be put into service, according to an inspector general report. Alstom, which is building the trains in Hornell, New York, has delivered only 10 of the 28 that were contracted to be ready in 2021. For now, those 10 sit idle at a Pennsylvania train yard, visible to Amtrak passengers that come and go from Philadelphia. 30th Street Station.
Meanwhile, Amtrak has spent more than $48 million on maintenance to keep aging Acela trains running.
Hopes were high in 2016, when then-Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. and Anthony R. Coscia, president of Amtrak at the time, stood outside a Wilmington, Delaware, train station and announced a $2.45 billion federal loan. for Amtrak. to bring high-speed rail travel to the Northeast. That year, Amtrak selected Alstom, which had built the original Acela fleet in 2000, to build the new trains.
Under the terms of the contract, Alstom was required to create a computer model to predict the performance of trains before even starting to build them, a crucial stipulation since the Federal Railroad Administration, which enforces railroad safety standards, must approve a model that proves a train is safe before it can be tested on the Northeast Corridor tracks.
The corridor's curves, bridges and tunnels posed a particular challenge for Alstom. It is estimated that the region's tracks will need more than $100 billion in repairs and improvements for new trains to reach maximum speeds throughout the corridor.
In 2019, the company had struggled. According to Amtrak officials and Alstom representatives, the train manufacturer told Amtrak that computer models showed the new trains could not safely run on the Northeast Corridor tracks. However, Alstom said the company could fix the problems and wanted to move forward.
Amtrak gave Alstom the go-ahead to build the trains despite computer modeling problems because, Amtrak officials said, they felt they had no other choice. More recently, Amtrak officials acknowledged that they did not include safeguards in the contract with Alstom to protect themselves in case the company had difficulty developing working trains.
“I think there's some debate now about whether or not it should be a contractual mechanism,” said Laura Mason, Amtrak's executive vice president of capital delivery.
In January 2020, a report from Amtrak's inspector general warned of continued delays and safety issues with trains, as did another inspector general's report in September 2023. In an unredacted version of that most recent report obtained by The New York Times, inspectors discovered that the trains still did not pass modeling tests and that those that had been built so far had defects. Although the defects could be fixed, according to the report, some trains required “structural and design modifications,” while others needed “sealant, drainage or corrosion corrections.”
Jim Mathews, executive director of the Railroad Passengers Association, an advocacy group, said that as Amtrak and Alstom move forward with testing trains on the tracks, they will pay close attention to tilt technology and how well it helps trains to take curves. at high speeds.
“I would expect a pretty smooth testing regime going forward because most of the issues have been identified,” Mathews said. “We will see how they run now that they will be in the Northeast Corridor.”
