After years of delays, Amtrak is moving toward faster trains in the Northeast

After years of delays, safety and design disputes, Amtrak is one step closer to bringing new high-speed trains to the busy Northeast Corridor.

Amtrak officials said late Friday that the new trains, which had failed an extensive battery of computer modeling tests, had passed the 14th attempt and had been cleared by the Federal Railroad Administration to begin testing on the tracks running from Washington, DC, to Boston.

The faster, more spacious trains – sets of locomotives plus passenger cars – carry a price tag of about $1.6 billion and will replace those in the Acela fleet, which were supposed to be retired at the end of their life cycle in 2016.

The sleek new red, white and blue Avelia Liberty trains must travel at a maximum speed of about 260 miles per hour due to a limit imposed by the northeast corridor's aging tracks, 16 miles faster than current Acela trains, and are expected to tilt for a faster and smoother ride through corners. They can accommodate up to 386 passengers, an increase of 25 percent.

Testing at the tracks will be “the next step in the safety certification process leading to the launch of revenue service,” Amtrak said in a statement.

Cliff Cole, spokesman for Alstom, the French manufacturer of the new trains, called the move to on-rail testing a progress for passengers “who will soon discover a whole new travel experience on America's busiest rail corridor.”

But the project, which is 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, the passenger rail service targeted October 2024 for the new trains to go into service, according to an inspector general report. Alstom, which builds the trains in Hornell, N.Y., has delivered just 10 of the 28 trains that were contracted to be ready in 2021. For now, those 10 sit idle in a Pennsylvania train yard, visible to Amtrak passengers in and out of Philadelphia . 30th Street Station.

In the meantime, Amtrak has spent more than $48 million on maintenance to keep the aging Acela trains running.

There were high expectations in 2016, when then-Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. and Anthony R. Coscia, then the chairman of Amtrak, outside a train station in Wilmington, Del. and announced a $2.45 billion federal loan for Amtrak. to bring high-speed rail to the Northeast. That year, Amtrak selected Alstom, which had built the original Acela fleet in 2000, to manufacture the new trains.

Under the terms of the contract, Alstom was required to create a computer model to predict the performance of the trains before even starting to build them – a crucial requirement since the Federal Railroad Administration, which enforces railroad safety rules, must create a model approval that shows a train is safe before it can be tested on the Northeast Corridor tracks.

The corridor's bends, bridges and tunnels posed a particular challenge for Alstom. It is estimated that the region's rail lines will need more than $100 billion in repairs and upgrades for the new trains to reach maximum speed along the entire corridor.

In 2019, the company ran into problems. According to Amtrak officials and Alstom representatives, the train manufacturer told Amtrak that computer models showed the new trains could not operate safely on the Northeast Corridor tracks. Nevertheless, Alstom said the company was able to resolve the issues and wanted to move forward.

Amtrak gave Alstom permission to build the trains despite the computer modeling problems because, Amtrak officials said, they felt they had no other choice. More recently, Amtrak officials acknowledged that they had failed to include safeguards in the contract with Alstom to protect themselves in the event that the company had difficulty developing work trains.

“I think there's some discussion going on now as to whether or not that should be a contractual mechanism,” said Laura Mason, Amtrak's executive vice president for capital delivery.

In January 2020, an Amtrak inspector general's report warned of continued delays and safety issues with the trains, as did a report from another inspector general in September 2023. In an unredacted version of that more recent report obtained by The New York Times, inspectors found that the trains still failed modeling tests and that the trains built so far had defects. Although the defects could be corrected, some trains required “structural and design changes,” while others needed “sealing, drainage or corrosion corrections.”

Jim Mathews, CEO of the Rail Passenger Association, an advocacy group, said that as both Amtrak and Alstom move forward with testing the trains on the tracks, they will pay close attention to the tilt technology and how well it helps the trains make turns. at high speeds.

“I would expect a fairly relaxed testing regime from now on as most of the issues have been identified,” Mr Mathews said. “We'll see how they run now that they're on the Northeast Corridor.”