Amtrak NextGen Acela Debuts on August 28 | Hacker News Reader

Amtrak NextGen Acela Debuts on August 28

media.amtrak.com

37 pointsreimbar68 comments

Finally! I saw these new trains stationed at Philadelphia Train Station. They're beautiful. I just wished they could operate at real high speed throughout the NEC.

I wish they had reasonable service through Pittsburgh to points west. The Pittsburgh station is sadly neglected.

Oooof it is. I went through there on the way to Chicago and couldn't believe it. "Is this really it?" It's like a station in rural Idaho, not one in a major city.

> In the coming months, Amtrak will be operating both the current Acela equipment and the NextGen Acela trains as the new trains transition into the fleet.

I do hope that at the time of booking they make it clear which Acela it is. Airlines do this: they usually mention the type of plane while booking. I might just do a trip on the new Acela to experience the train.

Haha. We're talking about the same Amtrak that tries to hide that you are booking a trip on a bus.

American Airlines also shows busses as flights from EWR to PHL. :)

Now there's a route where I would certainly choose Amtrak over air.

As far as I can tell, you clear security the normal way at your origin airport, and enter inside security at the intermediate hop. Not a terrible way to travel, I think. With taxi time and delays at EWR, it might not even be that much slower!

> “NextGen Acela is more than a new train—it’s an evolution of travel,” said Amtrak President Roger Harris.

Everyone's using ChatGPT these days.

Executives have been talking like that for a long time :)

I always wondered about that part of press releases. Why do they always claim some executive said a paragraph of text that they very obviously didn't say? Who are they supposed to be saying it to? Is it like a transcript of an imaginary press conference??

The marketing people create a paragraph for the exec to say, and it's discussed, and the exec usually has final approval, and then it's shipped.

It's so that articles can be easily written using the press release, no work necessary!

This press release was definitely shat out by it.

AI is trained on exec speak scattered all across common crawl.

Great news! I hope prices go back down a bit thanks to the extra capacity. I used to take Acela 3 times a week about a decade ago and they were rarely completely full. Now they're more expensive and fully booked much of the time, which is a real shame.

How is "full booked" a real shame?

Needing to book days in advance makes it unusable for short-notice trips (vs. driving), and due to the demand they basically doubled prices. It's now more expensive to take Acela than it is to take a plane; that wasn't the case a decade ago.

Rail should be easy to use.

I live in Switzerland where people are so comfortable taking the train they treat it like an extension of their living room.

Only in rare cases do I even book tickets in advance, like when going to Milano… otherwise I just use the Fairtiq app, which is a nation wide system for paying for tickets, including busses and trams…

You swipe right before you step on, swipe left when you step off and the system automatically calculates the best ticket for you.

There isn’t a “fully booked”.

Switzerland is also the size of one of the smallest states in America.

And, what’s your point?

Its easy to do in a small area, harder in a big area like the US.

I visited Switzerland recently and loved the train network. One really awesome feature was that the train stations basically doubled as shopping malls. Which makes a lot of sense, imo!

We'd leave our room for the day, have breakfast at a restaurant or coffee shop in the train station, then jump on the train to whatever outing we had planned. At the end of the day, we'd take the train back, pick up some groceries at one of the grocery stores in the station (I saw at least two major grocery stores in our station), and then head to the room and make dinner. I also needed to visit a pharmacy at one point during our stay, and the only pharmacy open at that sleepy hour was at the train station.

The train stations are really major hubs for the towns. Even if I didn't need to take the train that day, I was still likely to make a trip down to the train station for something. It's smart.

As others have noted, the bigger bottleneck on the Northeast Corridor is the tracks themselves (or more precisely, a small number of problematic old railroad bridges and tunnels). Amtrak has been moving to replace them under the Gateway project[1], but it's a significant undertaking given how critical the existing lines are.

[1]: https://amtraknewera.com/gateway/

wow, they took the AI emoji response and put it right in the press release

good catch! wow...

Unfortunately, this doesn't seem like it will speed up travel much at all.

Based on my understanding, travel times in the northeast are limited not by the top speed of the trains, but by the tracks, and the fact that freight is prioritized.

Honestly, if it's my own money I usually just take the older regional trains. Saving 30 minutes isn't generally worth a $100 or so to me.

Legally, freight is supposed to yield to passengers nationwide. It's in the legislation that created Amtrak over fifty years ago. It has never been enforced, and trump isn't about to do it. The UP/NS merger will make it worse. On Amtrak-controlled trackage, there is hope. Northeast Corridor is their show.

Indeed. My understanding was that for most of the country it's de facto the opposite: Amtrak yields to freight.

For as much as Biden purported to be a pro-passenger train President, you'd think he would have done something about that.

The problem is that the freight companies run these incredibly long trains now, which no longer fit into the siding (a bit of track that splits off from and then reconnects to the main track to allow one train to pass the other). So even if a freight train wanted to, it couldn’t let another train pass unless the freight companies invested in longer sidings or shorter trains.

I have traveled a fair amount via Amtrak, and in general, I don't really like their newer cars. The old ones were fabric, huge bathrooms, spacious and comfy. The double decker ones had a feeling like you were almost in a traveling apartment. These new ones feel like the new plane interiors: more cramped, more plastic, etc. Nothing to scream at the sky about, but solidly a step down IMO. Maybe I'm just getting old lol. I suspect they are more economical though, and therefore more profitable.

The new Amtrak cars on Midwest and California service are made by Siemens. They are a huge downgrade in terms of customer comfort versus the old equipment. The seats are worse than a budget airline seat. This is in contrast to the old equipment where the coach seats were more comfortable than a domestic first class airline seat. The business class seats on the old trains were practically lay-flat, the new ones don't recline at all.

Unfortunately Siemens has become something of a monopoly outside of Asia and France for passenger trains and they've apparently decided that train travel should be uncomfortable, with bad seats and harsh lighting.

The upside to these new Acela trains is that they were built by the French railcar maker Alstrom, not by Siemens like the rest of the new Amtrak carriages.

The cutting edge for high-speed rail around the world is 350 km/h, with the fastest lines having average speeds (taking stops into account) of about 275 km/h. At those speeds, it would take:

  * DC to NYC: 80 minutes.
  * NYC to Boston: 80 minutes.
  * NYC to Toronto: 2 hours and 45 minutes.
  * NYC to Chicago: 4 hours and 35 minutes.

That would put a massive dent in air travel. One can only dream, I guess.

“More seats: 27% more seats per departure” I think trains are cool. I hope this train doesn’t feel like a budget airline that has no leg room.

Seems like the train set is around 30 feet longer and has more (maybe shorter) cars than the Acela express.

It'd be nice to see the distribution to know if there are some other efficiencies with relation to total length (shorter power cars) or internally (better seat distribution, maybe less first class...). Haven't looked much around, so maybe it's easy to get that info.

  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avelia_Liberty
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acela_Express_(trainset)

I think this is because of adding an additional car in each trainset, rather than squishing seats together.

Acela Express has 8 cars, while the new Avelia Liberty is 9.

Acela is the premium route, so they will likley have pretty good leg room.

What is "5G-enabled Wi-Fi"? Does that just mean the train receives its connectivity via 5G and broadcasts Wi-Fi?

That's usually what I've seen done in Europe or even in Japan

Sure appears that way. Wish they used Starlink. 5G cuts out at high speeds.

I've used some of those WiFi services at near 200mph, so I guess it'll depend on the 5G, LTE or HSPA frequencies it connects to. They're never great, though, although I guess that's also related to tunnels and the quantity of people aboard.

Yeah train wifi is generally terrible. Basically the only real solution is 100% 5G coverage along all train tracks or starlink. This is basically a global issue because line-of-sight for trains is a hard problem.

It's really hard, because anything gets confounded by tunnels unless you have specific repeaters for them, or the train is longer than the tunnel.

I'm surprised it didn't mention the time to get between NYC and DC. Anyone know?

I don't know if these trains are supposed to be much faster than the existing train sets, which do it in like 3 hours?

(My understanding is that the speed limits is more to do with the railways than the actual trainsets, but maybe that's wrong. Apparently they go 160mph at max vs 150 on the old ones, but I don't know if that speed can be sustained between DC and NYC)

Limited by railways and number of stops too. On a 500km trip in France (Paris - Strasbourg) you can save 15min by taking the train with no stops : 1h46 vs 2h and 2 stops

Tickets can't be booked yet, so I can't say for sure, but I've seen in some places some mention to variations of this:

> Amtrak's expects a roughly 30 minute reduction in travel time between both DC and NYC and NYC and Boston once all NEC upgrades are completed.

DC --> NYC right now is about 3 hours, so I guess it'll be near 2:30 if those upgrades are completed?

Funny that this pops up while I'm on Amtrak (specifically California Zephyr).

How's the Wifi these days?

Nonexistent. The laptop on which I'm typing this comment is running off my phone as a hotspot lmao

I don’t really see what’s newsworthy. Acela already runs in the NE corridor and many trains have outlets. Other than the 27% increase in trains, it’s hard to tell what’s different

The fact they don't mention they are any faster is disappointing. I'm all for a better cabin experience (I take the Acela at least once a month) although first class was perfectly acceptable. Much better than flying.

Trains compete with highways, faster speed usually isn't the deciding factor.

That’s only true with short distances or crappy trains. I’ll drive DC to NYC rather than take the train, as it’s cheaper and not much slower. If Acela were a proper high-speed line I might switch. DC to Boston is close to a toss up, ~7 vs ~9 hours, but a proper high-speed train that did it in 2.5 hours would be really attractive.

I have to drive about an hour in the wrong direction to get to Amtrak from west of Boston. But I hate driving into NYC so I generally do it anyway rather than driving solo even though it takes longer and costs more.

With modern high-speed rail and a fairly modest average speed of 200 km/h (taking stops into account, because modern HSR can go >350 km/h), it would only take 3.5 hours to get from DC to Boston (passing through NYC).

Yep, Acela is rather pathetic, especially the portion between NYC and Boston.

The new trains can go to 160mph, which is slightly faster than the old ones. But...Acela's speed is really limited by the safety of the tracks not the train sets. I remember when they were testing 155mph service in 2010, but they could only do it on tiny sections of the track. Sadly it only really gets faster once they fix the infrastructure like bridges.

MTGA

"make railways great again" is a little easier to pronounce as an initialism

but you've got an internal rhyme in your version, so idk

I just want more choo choos

Why does new infrastructure in America have to be so ugly? The new Acela is ugly and the new mail truck is just hideous.

Love how they mention they’re built in the US by union workers…likely at 10x the cost of making them elsewhere. Modern day unions in the US is not what you think they are. They are the reason why we can’t have fast infrastructure upgrades. People in Japan/Korea/EU figured it out why can’t we have them here in the US?

Sorry, but EU workers commonly have unions.

Edit: To extend a little bit, just saying that unions aren't the main problem with not having better public infrastructures in the US. Also, unions models are different outside of the US. I don't have a lot of information about US unions, but I've felt like the model is a lot more individualistic and closed to the sector they're working for, and in Europe go hand in hand with global workers unions.

Yeah that’s my point. You guys have good unions.

Japan and the EU, and to a lesser extent, Korea, have actual social safety nets and their unions have the protection and support of the State.

In the USA the Union might be the only reason a certain profession has a healthcare plan at all. The relationship is so combative, unions basically have to adopt a "fuck you I'll get mine" attitude or they're passing things over the bargaining table for nothing in return.

Americans got the labor market they deserve: a transactional one.

To add a complementary point: Unions here are 'global', i.e while you have some sector-specific unions (police, farmers), most unions are 'piloted' by a central bureau, that can't actually force a strike or prevent one, but can add guidelines for strikes, present a plan, decide to organise sympathy strikes or not, decide on compensating striking workers on some specific strike to make it last longer: a postal strike limited to the single city I lived in pre-COVID lasted 6 weeks and you had white collar workers, sometimes in business suit, sometimes dressed like me (probably usually working in IT) doing the mail distribution. It only lasted 6 weeks because the central union decided to use their 'strike comp' budget on this topic that specific year.

And unions make you vote a lot. Once every year for my representative, plus almost every time a sympathy strike can be organised.

Hornell, New York isn't exactly a commerce center and wages in rural western New York are rather depressed these days. The last fast thing that came out of that region was the Hungerford Rocket Car over in Elmira, and that was a hundred years ago.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com