Why 2023 emerged as a banner year for passenger rail

One of the brightest moments in decades for U.S. passenger rail advocates came in September, when a black and gold train consisting of two locomotives and four passenger cars broke through a banner and came to a stop at the Orlando airport amid a shower of confetti and cheers from hundreds of onlookers.

It was the first time that a Brightline train with paying passengers made the journey from Miami to the Orlando area, linking two of the biggest tourist destinations in Florida with the comforts of a modern train. It means visitors to the Sunshine State could walk along South Florida’s legendary beaches and spend time at Disney World without enduring a four-hour drive in between.

Orlando Mayor Buddy Dyer celebrated the occasion by giving a key to the city to Wes Edens, the founder and chairman of Brightline, the private company that operates the service. “This,” Dyer said to the crowd on the train platform, “is one of the days we live for.”

The occasion gave Americans a glimpse of what a newly invigorated passenger rail system could look like. It is one of many developments in 2023 that has signaled that a future rail passenger advocates have long hoped for might soon materialize.

“2023 was a perfect storm,” said Joseph Aiello, the director for community engagement and organizing for the Rail Passengers Association. It was the culmination of efforts by government agencies, advocates and passenger rail companies over many years. But those long-running initiatives started paying off this year and could continue. “I really believe this is just the beginning,” Aiello said.

There are lots of reasons for optimism among passenger rail advocates. The splashiest of those came in recent months, as the Biden administration finally unveiled its vision for passenger rail expansions paid for through the 2021 infrastructure law. Going into a reelection campaign, President Joe Biden placed big bets on a few massive rail expansion efforts—particularly in the Northeast and California—while stoking interest in dozens of other potential projects in nearly every state.

But there were other signs this year that the ground might be shifting, even if they didn’t garner as much attention.

Amtrak notched a significant victory as it fought freight railroads to better accommodate passenger trains. Two freight carriers agreed to allow Amtrak to revive its Gulf Coast line rather than risk an adverse ruling from a powerful regulatory panel. The fight over the route between New Orleans and Mobile, Alabama, took outsize importance because it had the potential to impact future efforts to expand passenger rail service. (Almost all rail lines outside of the Northeast Corridor are owned by those private companies.) The terms of the Gulf Coast agreement are not public, though, and fights with the city of Mobile over the construction of a new rail station have delayed the restart of the service.

But the same regulatory panel, the Surface Transportation Board, separately launched an investigation in July into whether Union Pacific was disobeying federal law by delaying Amtrak trains that travel between New Orleans and Los Angeles. Freight railroads are supposed to give passenger trains priority on their tracks, but Amtrak has complained for years that they flout the law. The STB, which has taken the freight rail industry to task for poor performance in recent years, said its investigation into the dispute between Amtrak and Union Pacific would be the first of its kind.

Meanwhile, a stalled effort in Congress to slash Amtrak’s operations budget could show that the appetite on Capitol Hill for starving the passenger rail service might be waning. Congress has repeatedly cut subsidies for the service over its half-century history, resulting in fewer routes and decrepit infrastructure. And Republican politicians have often pilloried passenger rail projects as wasteful spending. In the early years of the Obama administration, GOP governors in Florida, Ohio, New Jersey and Wisconsin rejected federal rail grants that their Democratic predecessors secured.

This year, though, a dispute over Amtrak funding derailed efforts to pass a Republican-authored budget bill in the U.S. House covering transportation and housing programs. A group of Northeast Republicans balked at a provision that would have cut Amtrak subsidies by two-thirds and reduced funding to run the Northeast Corridor between Boston and Washington, D.C., by 85%.

Aiello, from the Rail Passengers Association, said the support for Amtrak has grown in Congress because of work advocates have done there over the last decade. Amtrak enjoys bipartisan support in the Senate, where red state and blue state lawmakers push the agency for more service. But in the House, it was New York Republicans, in particular, who supported Amtrak and wanted even more money to go toward it, Aiello said. “They built that firewall in New York that helped squash everything that was coming out of the House leadership,” he said.

As the funding fight played out on Capitol Hill, the Biden administration offered a starkly different vision for the future of passenger rail. The president, long known as “Amtrak Joe,” came to New York to announce an “unprecedented” $16 billion plan to upgrade the electrified Northeast Corridor between Boston and Washington, D.C., that Amtrak owns and operates.

Those improvements include $3.8 billion more to build new tunnels under the Hudson River, $4.8 billion to replace a 150-year-old tunnel in Baltimore, $2 billion to replace a bridge in northeastern Maryland and more than $1.5 billion for bridge replacements in Connecticut.

Officials from New York and New Jersey both hosted groundbreaking ceremonies in late November to mark the beginning of construction of a new set of rail tunnels underneath the Hudson River, which would increase capacity into New York’s Penn Station and allow Amtrak officials to eventually shore up the existing two tunnels that were damaged in Hurricane Sandy.

It was a remarkable turnaround for a project that seemingly looked dead little more than a decade ago. Former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie pulled the plug on a similar effort in 2010 ostensibly to save money, which sent Amtrak and transit advocates back to the drawing board. Even after Hurricane Sandy flooded the railroad’s century-old tunnels in 2012, local leaders were wary of committing to a project. When they finally did, their biggest obstacle became a former New York resident, then-President Donald Trump, who blocked the effort from moving forward.

The passage of the 2021 infrastructure law marked a major turning point for the so-called Gateway Project in the New York area, which includes the new set of tunnels, along with a new bridge and related improvements on the New Jersey approach to the city.

When breaking ground for the new tunnels in November, New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy called the tunneling effort “the most important infrastructure project in the nation.”

One of the few infrastructure projects that eclipses the New York tunnels in sheer size is California’s effort to build high-speed rail between Los Angeles and San Francisco. The effort stumbled out of the gates after California voters dedicated $10 billion for it in 2008, and construction so far is limited to the Central Valley. Even after new management put the project on more solid footing, the high-speed rail effort had few prominent champions in Sacramento or Washington after Gov. Jerry Brown left office in early 2019.

That also changed in 2023, when the Biden administration awarded the project more than $3 billion to continue construction on what would become the fastest passenger train in the U.S. once it is completed. It was the largest federal grant the California High-Speed Rail Authority had ever received.

“The federal government is back on building high-speed rail in America,” said Brian Kelly, the CEO of the state rail authority, when the grant was announced. “This award is just a great leap forward.”

Andy Kunz, the president and CEO of U.S. High-Speed Rail Association, said the money showed “the tide has turned for high-speed rail in America.”

“Electrified bullet trains will transform the nation’s transportation system—reducing congestion, helping end our dependency on fossil fuels and advancing the fight against climate change,” he said. “This investment by the Biden Administration represents a milestone in advancing our progress and making us competitive with the 26 nations that currently have fast, clean and safe high-speed trains.”

But another big winner of federal passenger rail money was Brightline, which is also building a high-speed route between Las Vegas and the Los Angeles suburbs. The railroad secured $3 billion from the federal government to lay new tracks through the desert that could whisk trains at close to 200 mph. Edens, the billionaire founder of Brightline, hosted an event in Las Vegas to commemorate the occasion. This time, though, it wasn’t the local mayor headlining the list of dignitaries: It was the president.