North America’s fastest train currently sits in a Philadelphia storage yard. Once slated to enter service in 2021, the next generation Acela Express will not carry passengers for at least another year. That’s according to an October
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The OIG blames the French manufacturer, Alstom, for these problems while the company, whose share prices
The plight of the $2.3 billion Acela replacement program highlights several current policy issues: America’s decaying transit infrastructure, the scope of federal safety regulations, and the role of multinational corporations in an industry subject to 2021’s
Over a century ago, U.S. locomotives paced the world. Thomas Edison boasted in 1882 that he could drive his new electromagnetic engine at 180 miles per hour “if I wanted to.” In 1893, the steam-powered Empire State Express actually
Trains lost their luster after World War II, when federal legislation favored private cars and commercial jets. In 1956, President Dwight D. Eisenhower signed a Federal-Aid Highway Act that committed $25 billion to building expressways for economic growth and national defense. In 1958, Congress passed legislation that created the Federal Aviation Administration to promote safer, more efficient flight at speeds no train could match.
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But as train ridership dwindled at home, a rail revolution was fomenting abroad thanks to post-war reconstruction efforts underwritten by loans from the new World Bank. In 1964, Japanese National Railways began firing bubble-nosed electric trains over the Tokaido Shinkansen Line at 130 miles per hour. To Americans tuning into the Tokyo Summer Olympics, footage of bullet trains racing past Mount Fuji came as a revelation—a zero-altitude Sputnik moment that made many rethink the future of domestic transportation.
In 1965, Congress passed the
To appease fiscal conservatives opposed to transportation budget increases, Johnson said that the Department of Commerce would work “in cooperation with private industry” to develop train designs at “no cost to the Government.” While this approach limited spending, it did not adequately account for the fact that fast trains needed dedicated tracks, welded rails, and new electrical power systems to tap their full potential. Without these improvements, America’s bullet trains would languish on the northeast corridor, an antiquated rail line already congested with freight and commuter traffic.
Instead of overhauling the corridor, the Ground Transportation Act funded two splashy demonstration projects. The first project resulted in a gasoline-powered Shinkansen look-alike called the TurboTrain. Engineered by the United Aircraft Company (UAC) and named after the Latin word for tornado, the TurboTrain employed the same Pratt and Whitney turbine technology that lifted planes and helicopters. On Dec. 20, 1967, a test Turbo whipped through Princeton Junction
The aerospace train performed less impressively in regular service between New York and Boston. Though passengers lauded the Turbo’s futuristic look and airline-inspired decors, the train averaged just 63 miles per hour on a winding track bed hampered by worn rails, cracked wooden ties, and many road crossings. Unable to reach full speed, the fuel guzzling turbine technology could not justify its operating cost. By 1976, UAC’s train of the future was rusting away on a spur beside the Providence River.
The Ground Transportation Act’s second demonstration featured the electric Metroliner, a stainless steel tube of a train that promised two-and-a-half hour trips over the Pennsylvania Railroad between New York and Washington, D.C.. Manufactured by General Electric, Westinghouse, and the Budd Company, the Metroliner
Saunders ate his words when the Metroliner proved a lemon. Its air compressor coils rattled. Its carriages wobbled on turns and heaved like merry-go-round horses. Metroliners sucked up ballast stones lining the corridor track bed and even
In the end, design flaws, decrepit track, and American impatience doomed the Great Society’s trains. But Johnson’s budget-neutral template survived to guide later projects.
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In 2000, Amtrak debuted Acela Express, a silvery-blue electric trainset that adapted Alstom’s French TGV design to run on the northeast corridor’s rugged tracks. Alstom and its consortium partner Bombardier financed Amtrak’s purchase so that the cash-strapped railroad paid
While these provisions helped sell the project, Acela never lived up to expectations. One problem was that the train needed to be bulked up to meet federal crashworthiness standards. Since Acela shared tracks with lumbering freights, it had to be able to sustain high-force collisions that could not happen on systems dedicated exclusively to passenger trains elsewhere in the world. Alstom engineers took to calling the train
The 21st-century global boom in passenger rail projects has shown how fast trains can boost perception of the countries that run them. State-of-the-art systems in China, Japan, France, Spain, Italy, Saudi Arabia, and South Korea have given their builders an air of stylish modernity. The U.S.’s frustrated pursuit of a bullet train, by contrast, reveals the perils of infrastructural compromises that make one set of tracks accommodate freight customers, commuters, and inter-city riders, and one train deliver profits while also serving the public good. Until public officials can decide what U.S. passenger trains should be—and who they must serve—the conditions that produced the star-crossed next-generation Acela project will temper the promise of American high-speed rail.
David Alff is the author of