Amtrak Amtrak

By the late 1960s American passenger trains were losing hundreds of millions of dollars a year as travelers moved to cars and planes, and the private railroads that ran them wanted out. The 1970 bankruptcy of the Penn Central, the largest corporate failure in the country to that date, forced the issue. The Rail Passenger Service Act, signed by Richard Nixon on October 30, 1970, created the National Railroad Passenger Corporation, soon known as Amtrak, to take over the intercity routes. It ran its first trains on May 1, 1971, keeping fewer than half of the routes then operating.

Amtrak operates more than 300 trains a day on a network of about 21,000 route miles serving more than 500 stations in 46 states, the District of Columbia, and three Canadian provinces. Its busiest and only consistently profitable line is the Northeast Corridor between Washington and Boston, which Amtrak largely owns and where its Acela high-speed trains run. Most of the rest of its network runs on track owned by freight railroads, which are required by law to give passenger trains priority but often do not. State-supported routes under 750 miles, funded jointly with states, carry a large share of riders, and long-distance trains such as the Empire Builder and California Zephyr serve rural communities with few other options.

Amtrak is a for-profit corporation in form, with stock held mostly by the federal government, but it has never turned a profit across its whole network and relies on annual federal grants. A nine-member board of directors, appointed by the President and confirmed by the Senate along with the Secretary of Transportation, oversees it and hires its chief executive. It employs about 21,000 people. Ridership reached records above 32 million in fiscal 2024. The 2021 infrastructure law gave Amtrak and intercity rail about 66 billion dollars, the largest investment in passenger rail since Amtrak's creation, much of it for aging Northeast Corridor tunnels and bridges.

Debate over Amtrak has run in a loop for half a century. Critics argue that long-distance routes lose money on every ticket and that taxpayers should not subsidize them, and several administrations have proposed cutting them or privatizing the corporation. Supporters argue that every form of transportation is subsidized, that highways and airports receive far more, and that Amtrak's losses are small for a national network. The arrival of new Acela trains in 2025 and continued tunnel construction under the Hudson River have kept attention on the Northeast, while the long-distance network's future depends on Congress.