Every day, several speeding Amtrak trains slow from a roaring 110 miles per hour to a crawl of 30 miles per hour as they pass through a 151-year-old tunnel.
The Baltimore and Potomac Tunnel was built in 1873 and was hailed as an engineering marvel at the time. It connected Washington, D.C., to Baltimore by rail and allowed Maryland farmers to ship crops to markets in the city. Now, a century and a half later, the 1.4-mile-long tunnel has become a poster child for the country’s neglected rail infrastructure, which is often mired in political squabbles and left to the burden of ordinary citizens (in this case, commuters) as a result of.
Last March, Amtrak began a $6 billion project to build a new tunnel scheduled to open in 2035, with $66 billion in funding provided by the 2021 infrastructure bill. One of dozens of rail renewal projects across the country.
“Right now, we’re primarily trying to capture assets from the 19th and 20th centuries and pull them into the 21st century,” Amtrak CEO Stephen Gardner said. wealth in an interview.
In addition to the Baltimore and Potomac Tunnels, Amtrak has some similarly aging infrastructure throughout the Northeast. Elsewhere in Maryland, trains rattled across the Susquehanna Bridge, which was built in 1906 when Theodore Roosevelt was president and there were only 46 states in the United States. The Sawtooth Bridge, built years later, still carries commuters in northern New Jersey.
The bridges and tunnels, which are more than a century old, are among the most eye-popping examples of the country’s aging rail network. But across the U.S., some newer but still outdated infrastructure limits train speeds, often causing crowding and delays. Decades-old tracks mean that on some routes trains cannot accelerate to their top speeds, making modern locomotives pointless.
As Amtrak’s years-long repair backlog continues to build, lawmakers are increasingly uninterested in spending the money needed to repair it. This means that as infrastructure continues to struggle, the price of fixing them keeps rising, which only makes it an increasingly unattractive investment. Before the infrastructure bill, Amtrak had never received so much funding from the federal government, which subsidizes most of the company’s capital expenditures. Like most passenger rail operators, Amtrak doesn’t make enough money from ticket sales to pay for the tens of billions of dollars needed to regularly upgrade track, buy new locomotives and invest in new lines. Worse, it is often mired in the battles of congressional politics, making necessary funding hard to come by.
“If you have to buy new equipment or make major infrastructure improvements, you have to do it with government funding,” said Allan Zarembski, a professor of civil engineering at the University of Delaware. “That’s the world. What other places have done. Historically, Amtrak has been influenced by the current administration or the current political climate.
Nationally, infrastructure investment is lagging behind. According to the American Society of Civil Engineers, there is a maintenance backlog worth $45 billion on the Northeast Corridor alone, the nation’s busiest train route from Washington, D.C., to Boston. According to the same report, antiquated infrastructure along the country’s rail lines resulted in train delays totaling 328,000 minutes, equivalent to about 700 trips from Washington to Boston.
As of last November, Amtrak had made significant progress in addressing accumulated maintenance issues along the Northeast Corridor. Amtrak worked with the Department of Transportation to secure $16.4 billion in funding for 25 projects along the route. The projects include building a new Hudson River tunnel between New York and New Jersey. The original tunnel was built in 1910 and suffered severe saltwater damage during Superstorm Sandy in 2012. Use the train.
In Maryland, the Susquehanna Bridge is expected to receive $2.1 billion to build faster track. Throughout the rail corridor, outdated rails force trains to slow down and prevent them from reaching their top speeds. Another set of repairs planned for a 117-year-old bridge over the Connecticut River will allow trains to speed up from 45 mph to 70 mph.
“In many ways, we are still essentially operating a 19th-century rail network, and we have gradually improved that network,” Gardner said.
