Amtrak has had issues from the day it formed, decades before I was born.

So in some ways, Amtrak isn’t in any more “trouble” than that day, when Congress created it to pick up the pieces of failing private rail companies in the wake of the United States’ massive public investment in highways, airports, and other subsidies for these forms of transportation.

On the other hand, things in 2025 seem uniquely bad for Amtrak and U.S. passenger rail, even though Amtrak hit another record year for passengers.

Prices on the Northeast Corridor are nuts (I’ve been choosing the bus.) Heat waves, floods, and other issues have shut down routes (often made worse by fossil-fuel dependence), revealing crumbling infrastructure. Long-distance trains are often hours late because of freight trains (Sadly, this one is nothing new).

These issues have all been decades in the making.

But now an openly hostile federal government has made it worse. They’ve canceled approved grants like ones for Amtrak’s Texas Triangle High Speed Rail, and republican-led states aren’t much more friendly. At best, they’ll keep the status quo, which means older and older infrastructure.

Despite all the new and old issues, Amtrak hit a record ridership in 2024 and again in 2025.

State-supported routes like the Ethan Allen Express have opened in recent years, with success. This is my favorite route, as it now allows me to visit my parents in Vermont from New York with a reasonable train.

Regardless of how we define “trouble,” I have full confidence in two important things.

First, Amtrak has issues. No debate from anyone on that.

Second, Amtrak’s future is up for grabs. We can still shape Amtrak and U.S. passenger rail for the better with our advocacy.

If you’re reading this, I assume you already agree that it would be a good thing to have faster, more reliable trains to more places, for reasons ranging from quality of life, to environmental protection to land-use improvement. I assume you also agree that these are good investments.

Amtrak’s Problems

All right, let’s get into its problems, old and new.

1) Not Enough Train Sets!

How can you run an effective train service without trains? Well, you can’t.

Many of Amtrak’s trains are very old. They often need repairs and get taken out of circulation. Without enough trains, you can’t run as much service. Planned routes are canceled, or Amtrak doesn’t plan to run as many routes as the demand allows.

This is happening coast to coast. The Cascades service, which runs from Seattle to Eugene, Oregon, had to cut down service due to corroding train sets.

Not Enough Trains = Less Service = Higher Prices

People want to ride trains, especially in the Northeast Corridor. But without enough trains to meet this demand, combined with lawmakers’ pressure on Amtrak to turn a profit, that means Amtrak is charging as much as they can to squeeze as much revenue out of the routes they can run. That means ridiculous prices if you’re going between Boston and Washington D.C.

Before we get more service and lower prices, Amtrak needs new trains. GET AMTRAK NEW TRAINS, CONGRESS, PLEASE.

Are Improvements in Sight?

In 2025, Amtrak’s new higher-speed Avelia Acela trains began service. This is great, and although they’ve had some issues with doors and bathrooms, they’ll be more reliable than the old Acela train sets.

Howeve, the old Acela’s will likely be scrapped, but because they are in tough shape, and because their low platforms are pretty much exclusive to the Northeast corridor, so it’s not likely they’ll be used on other routes.

Thanks to a Biden-era investment, in 2026 Amtrak will get the new Airo train sets which will operate around the country. This will replace the “Amfleet,” which is the car you’re probably used to riding in on Amtrak.

When Amtrak gets funding, it gets better. So long-term, it’s a funding problem. We’ll have to get to problem number four to discuss that.

2) Crumbling Tracks and Infrastructure

As a New York Times article last year put it, Amtrak keeps breaking down because its infrastructure is over 100 years old.

This is happening at several key chokepoints. In Baltimore, Amtrak is working on replacing the Civil War-era Frederick Douglass Tunnel. Yes, from the Civil War.

In New York, Amtrak is working with the MTA to increase the capacity in Penn Station, decreasing a bottleneck, among 12 other Northeast Corridor projects.

It turns out, tunnels from the Civil War aren’t so reliable anymore. I’m using the Northeast as an example because I know about these projects, but this is the case across the Amtrak network. In California, eroded tracks led to long-term closures of the Los Angeles to San Diego route.

Again, this is mostly a funding problem. Automobile companies do not pay to maintain roads, and airlines don’t pay to maintain airports.

But repairing and funding improvements for those tracks has another complication.

3) Amtrak Doesn’t Own Most of Its Tracks

In the Northeast Corridor, where Amtrak does make a profit, they own the tracks.

The rest of the network is owned by freight railroads. And Amtrak gets stuck behind slow freight trains, especially on long-distance trains.

As James McCommons put it in his book Waiting on a Train: The Embattled Future of Passenger Rail Service, the freight companies are “reluctant hosts.”

If you’ve ever been on a long-distance Amtrak train and wondered why you’re sitting on the tracks for an hour in the middle of nowhere, chances are you were waiting for a freight train.

How Did This Happen?

When Amtrak was created in 1971, private passenger rail in the U.S. was dying. The federal government stepped in to preserve a basic national passenger rail system, but they didn’t buy the tracks. Instead, the gave Amtrak access rights to freight-owned railroads in exchange for taking on the unprofitable passenger service that freight companies wanted to ditch.

On paper, freight companies legally have to give passenger trains priority. In practice, freight trains themselves break down or get delayed, and Amtrak gets stuck behind them.

This Leads to Massive Delays for Long-Distance Trains

The result is delays, sometimes hours-long ones. In some parts of the country, like the Chicago-to-West Coast routes, delays can cascade for hundreds of miles because of a single freight-related hold-up.

Why It’s Hard to Fix

Freight rail isn’t profitable by moving fast, they’re profitable by moving large volumes long distances. It’s not worth it for them to put up the cash to invest in better tracks.

Freight companies fiercely protect their control of existing tracks. Even attempts to enforce passenger-priority laws often end up bogged down in court battles or bureaucratic delays.

So long as Amtrak is a guest on someone else’s railroad, it will never have full control over its schedule.

Another idea is to build dedicated passenger rail tracks and controls.

But whether it’s for new tracks or to improve existing ones, capital investments need to come from the government. While we seem to have a blank check of taxpayer money for roads, the same logic in the U.S. hasn’t held up for trains.

4) Hostile Republicans

Listen, I hate to be partisan, I really do. And I won’t pretend that democrats have done the greatest job in the world supporting and executing on passenger rail, as I wrote about in my critiques and ideas for California High Speed Rail.

However, in many pro-passenger rail states, most of which are run by Democrats, we’ve seen many successful expansions.

In Vermont, my beloved Ethan Allen Express receives state funding to run from New York to Burlington.

In Minnesota, the new Borealis train has been a huge success, connecting the Twin Cities to Chicago, thanks to state funding from Minnesota.

In Connecticut, the Hartford Line has succeeded thanks to investments from the state.

Even within states, you see the divide on investing in trains along partisan lines. This year, Pennsylvania republicans have held hostage Philadelphia’s public transit system.

It’s a similar story at the federal level. This year, the regime withdrew a $60 million grant to Amtrak to study Texas high-speed rail, an obviously beneficial project based on the distance and size of Houston, Dallas, and Austin. Although that was led by DOGE, whose leader and his car company have an obvious financial incentive to take down passenger rail.

The Success of Mardi Gras Service Gives Me Hope

A counterpoint to this is another exciting Amtrak success story: the return of Mardi Gras service from New Orleans to Mobile, Alabama, for the first time since Hurricane Katrina.

Amtrak received a $178 million grant to do so. Short $3 million, they asked Alabama and the City of Mobile to pitch in, and they almost refused. But it squeaked through with federal support and we now have more trains in deep red states. And it turns out, taking trains isn’t partisan in real life. People take trains if it’s competitive with other modes of transit. Mardi Gras Service has so far exceeded ridership expectations.

Why Republicans Hate Rail: They Love Their Fossil Fuel Donations

This is a complicated topic, and of course it will be incomplete, but there are a few key factors.

When you look closely, the hostility toward passenger rail from many Republican politicians comes down to two things: who funds them, and what story they tell about transportation in America.

1) Fossil Fuel and Auto Industry Money

The car and oil industries have been major donors to Republican campaigns for decades. A truly competitive, well-funded passenger rail system would eat into their bottom line: fewer car sales, less gas burned, fewer highways to keep paving.

You don’t have to dig far to see this conflict of interest in action. The current DOGE-led DOT is a case study: Elon Musk openly trashes high-speed rail while pushing car tunnels and selling Teslas. If you make money selling cars, you don’t want a train to compete with those cars.

2) The “Government Shouldn’t Subsidize Transit” Myth

Republicans often argue that Amtrak shouldn’t exist because it doesn’t make a profit. It’s true, Amtrak receives a few billion dollars in federal taxpayer subsidies. This sounds reasonable until you realize it’s a double standard:

• Airlines don’t pay to build or maintain airports. We do.
• Car companies don’t build or maintain highways. We do.
• Suburban sprawl is only possible because taxpayers massively subsidize roads, parking, and gas.

But somehow, when it comes to trains, suddenly the rule is that they must pay for themselves. Passenger rail will never turn a profit on fares alone. It isn’t supposed to. It doesn’t in any other country. It’s a public good, like schools, hospitals, fire departments, airports, and highways. The refusal to treat it that way has kept U.S. rail decades behind Europe and Asia.

3) Cars Are Culture-War Politics

There’s also an ideological angle. In the conservative imagination, the car is freedom. Rail is “government control” or a “woke urbanist fantasy,” even though the car infrastructure we have today is the result of the single largest government subsidy project in U.S. history (the Interstate Highway System). Supporting trains means questioning decades of car-centered policy, and that challenges both political identity and powerful donors.

When Politicians Tell on Themselves: Negative Projection as Propaganda

So what can we do?

Strategies to Fight For Amtrak and Passenger Rail

Any time I start to think about advocacy, I turn to a few questions:

• Who is already fighting?
• What seedlings do we have?
• What risks do we face?
• Who can we help?

Passenger Rail Association

The passenger rail “lobby,” our small counterpart to the massive lobbying efforts and resources of the automobile and fossil fuel industries, is a group called the Passenger Rail Association.

I’m a member and I donate a few bucks monthly. As a member, you get 10% off Amtrak trips. So that alone just about covers the donation.

Find Your Local Advocacy Group

The web of better urban planning and the battle against car-dependency is all connected. When you have more dense, walkable city centers, you have more demand for trains instead of cars, for example.

That’s why, whether it’s concerned with passenger rail or not, it’s great to find a local advocacy group.

These groups will also help you stay up to date on when you need to call your local representatives. Whenever there’s a push for something, they’ll let you know.

Talk About It

In Katherine Hayhoe’s book Saving Us, she shares that the single most important thing we can do to protect the environment is to talk about it. Change doesn’t just happen in policy—it happens when the culture shifts.

That’s true for passenger rail, too. Most Americans have never taken a train or only think of it as a slow, outdated option. Every time you talk about your good experiences on Amtrak or share why trains make sense for our future, you chip away at that narrative.

You don’t need to be an expert or have every stat memorized. Just tell stories: why you like trains, why they matter, what better rail could do for your town or region. Social change is contagious. When people hear a friend say “I wish we had better trains,” it normalizes the idea that this is something we can and should have.

Reach Out to Your Representatives

I hate saying this, because, well, when does it really do anything?

But in truth, because so few people reach out to representatives, if you do, your voice has a disproportionate say. This is especially true if you go to in-person meetings. On a hyper-local level, this matters a lot too.

I know that this month I could go to a meeting nearby me in the Bronx and ask for better Metro-North service, and that would have more impact than probably anything else I could do on my own.

If you can get a group to do that, even better.

Vote Like Trains Matter

Passenger rail rarely shows up as a ballot question, but the people you elect decide its future. Governors, state legislatures, mayors, city councils, they all have a say in funding, land use, and whether rail projects live or die.

If you want more trains, vote for leaders who support them. It’s a long game. It took us decades to get the car-dependent nightmare we’re in. It’ll take decades to undo it.

More Amtrak Guides!

This one has been more in the weeds, but check out some of my other guides on riding Amtrak.

Why I Take Amtrak Instead of Flying (Most of The Time)

10+ Amtrak BidUp Attempts Later: My Best Tips