On a Friday afternoon in July, the Acela departure board at New York Penn Station indicates that a train to Washington, DC, will depart in twelve minutes. Before the train leaves the Hudson tunnel, a man in a suit pulls a carry-on onto the platform, sits down at a table, opens his laptop, and starts working. In two hours and forty minutes, he will arrive in Washington, DC—no middle seat, no TSA line, and no drama with the overhead bin. Without having to pay more for a luggage, he purchased the ticket that morning for less than what a last-minute shuttle trip would have cost.
There are more and more instances of this scene, or something similar, occurring at train stations nationwide. In a recent fiscal year, Amtrak carried over 34 million passengers, setting a record by a significant margin. The factors that contributed to this figure are clear-cut, quantifiable, and unmysterious.
The most direct factor has been airfares. After the pandemic, domestic flight costs increased significantly, and they haven’t gone back to the levels when driving or flying was clearly more cost-effective for short-to medium-distance travel. The Acela begins to seem like a viable option when a family of four calculates the cost of flying from New York to Boston, taking into consideration baggage fees, ground transportation to and from airports farther from the city center, and the two hours of buffer time that any semi-rational person now builds into airport trips. It begins to appear as the obvious option in several corridor markets.
This change has something to do with the airport experience that isn’t quite evident in price comparisons. In 2026, traveling domestically in the United States is frequently unpleasant in the particular and predictable ways that have become commonplace background noise in American culture. security lines that are subject to staffing numbers. gates that alter. boarding procedures that force 180 individuals to stand in a tunnel for 30 minutes. seat pitches that give the impression that two hours is longer than it actually is. These things are not catastrophic. They are all continuously unpleasant in ways that add up over time until the question of whether it’s worth it to put up with all of it for the speed benefit begins to change.
To win on a particular route, a rail travel doesn’t have to be superior to flying in every dimension. All it needs to do is be competitive in terms of price and time, and far less painful in terms of everything else. For the majority of travelers, it meets that requirement on the majority of routes in the Northeast Corridor, the Boston-New York-Washington route with the highest passenger volume and frequency. The ability to get up and walk to the café car, the dependable Wi-Fi that Amtrak has invested in improving, the table seats where you can actually work instead of balancing a laptop on a tray table, and the quiet car option all contribute to a travel experience that feels qualitatively different from flying and is becoming more and more popular.
A distinct kind of attention has been drawn to the long-distance scenic routes. The California Zephyr, which travels through the Rockies and the Sierra Nevada on its way from Chicago to San Francisco, has gained a sincere following among tourists who believe that the journey is more important than the unfortunate expense of getting there. It is not a time-efficient way to go from Chicago to San Francisco in two days while witnessing the American landscape unfold through a large window. It’s a certain experience that consumers have determined they want, and it sells out. Similar fans follow the Coast Starlight, which runs from Seattle to Los Angeles. These are more akin to slow travel—a conscious decision to take extra time in exchange for a different caliber of experience—than commuter-logic travel.
It’s really unclear if this is a long-term change in American travel patterns or a cyclical correction that becomes less severe as airfares return to normal. The system is starting to benefit from the $66 billion rail investment from the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, which could increase the number of routes where rail is truly competitive. These improvements include new equipment, track upgrades, and route frequency investments. If it opens on time, Brightline West’s Las Vegas-to-Southern California project will bring private high-speed rail to a market that has never had it. There are more opportunities than in decades for a long-term rail renaissance in the United States. Whether or not they make one relies on whether the investment truly alters the product quickly enough to retain the current audience.
