Or, theres a new sheriff in town, and they might be willing to try these new things and ignore whatever crap Amtrak did and said in the past.
Amtrak used to run to Atlantaic City and Cape Cod and Clocker service (among other short routes). Theres no reason why they cant get back into the quasi-commuter rail game. They only left it because Rs changed the funding rules.
If you wait for SEPTA and NH to get their shit together, we will continue to wait forever. Maybe Joe and Pete realize this and are ready to ignore the R-led legislatures in those states that will always vote no. Its hard to tell in the map, but in California, the extension to Salinas/Monterey has been a "caltrain or Amtrak?" question for over a decade. Would be nice if they bulldozed past that wavering and just did it.
This country is crippled by inaction. It would be nice if this admin said YOLO and just actually did things. One can dream.
That's not applicable here. NNEPRA is the corridor manager for the
Downeaster. PRIAA makes Amtrak largely a spectator in that process, except for ensuring that the service they operate meets basic standards. It was NNEPRA's inability to get a tie replacement project they had known for 10 years was due get funded, coordinated, and enacted before the
DE went down in flames during a miserable 2018 summer of speed restrictions and mass cancellations. Amtrak warned Maine they were courting disaster slow-walking the project, Maine blew them off, and the results ended up eminently predictable. Amtrak was 100% right publicly excoriating them for focusing too much on expansion studies over basic bread-and-butter upkeep, and had to make threats because they weren't meeting basic service standards with their perennial slow-walk of mission-critical upkeep. Until/unless NNEPRA can execute the PTC-to-Union Station move correctly in service of the
DE's schedule, and put their big-boy pants on in the negotiating room to coordinate with incoming track owner CSX for resiliency improvements...by all means keep them on de facto probation to keep them fucking honest. NNEPRA can be absolutely terrifying short attention-span theatre to watch when they aren't being pressured with gun at their heads to stay on-focus. It is not the National Passenger Railroad Corporation's mission statement to paper over the corridor managing agency's rank amateurism. Rockland doesn't belong in the conversation until they can get through the other side of Portland without shooting their OTP load. Undo the PRIAA legislation first if we can't any longer trust the states to manage their own routes and need to re-nationalize it all. States were the ones who were clamoring for the extra degrees of control when that was passed. Yes...that means NHDOT and SEPTA need to get their shit together for the cause of waving the States' Rights bloody shirt in the first place. For the feds, that means pulsing more funding down to the states in very welcome fashion, but the states are still responsible for it. Incompetent states, unfortunately, still gonna incompetent. That being the natural downside of waving the bloody shirt for States Rights and reorganizing the whole principle of the network around that.
As for Concord...that one's even simpler. The MBTA has
lifetime and
irrevocable trackage rights to Concord acquired via the GLX Somerville land-swap agreements with Pan Am. Amtrak does not, and would have to haggle from-scratch for it. The Pilgrim Agreement already exists to template from its existing RI/MA use case to NH/MA and was conditionally approved in for use north of the border to pave the way for conducting the prior round of Plaistow and Cap Corridor expansion studies. Straight-up sign one's Sununu siggy on the dotted line and it's fully out-of-box scalable from everything from a South Nashua border poke to the Concord super-express. NH doesn't have
any state-level funding whatsoever for its two Amtrak routes. The feds pick up the full tally for the
Vermonter's in-state running miles, and creative accounting tricks lets NNEPRA launder across state lines for the
DE. You think the People's Legislature with the attention span of a fruit fly is safe to be tasked with drawing up PRIAA compliance legislation? No one even needs to bother with that task for it to be the Purple Line...just fill in the blanks at the increments the Pilgrim Agreement accrues its costs/revenues on that side of the border. And this is why the Cap Corridor studies don't spec an operator Alternative for Amtrak instead of T; it's exactly that self-evident which is the more straightforward means of enacting the service. Besides, at sub-
Springfield Shuttle distances it would take more work to pound the commuter-oriented fares into Amtrak's fare structure than it would the T's to begin with. Following the straight-up paths of least resistance precludes Amtrak for simple reason of not needing to duplicate already-settled legalities. That is not in the slightest incompatible with a greater mandate to Get Things Done™. But if NHDOT having a seat at the table is the impediment to getting things done
even if funding is available...a whole fucking lot of legislation has to get changed before screaming at USDOT gets anything done about it. The states have the right of refusal. They just do...whether that's wrongheaded or righteous of them.
Scranton/Binghamton/et al. is the route that blurs the lines on quasi-commuter because it's outside of any extant commuter district and would be a shitshow to coordinate otherwise. So it's being forged as an Amtrak service without Commuter Rail alts. Atlantic City doesn't--and never did--fit that mold. What garbage passed for AMTK service on that route over the years was downright terrible and barely usable, frequently yanked to and from with schedule/routing/branding changes in a sign of futility. SEPTA and NJT had their Pilgrim Agreement equivalent to template with West Trenton, and under NJT oversight the service has been enormously more stable and usable (all this despite the public-private "ACES" scheme from NYC falling apart...but absolutely nothing is preventing NJT from giving that another go). No one would rationally attempt NYC-Reading with the 30th St. Philly reverse move under the Amtrak flag and Amtrak pricing over a SEPTA re-extension and making sure the frequencies on both end of the transfer are worth a damn for what pittance of an actual NYC-Reading market there is. Same for Allentown which is an utter laugher of a schedule trying to leverage the Raritan Valley Line across Jersey for the one-seat vs. transferring at representatively good constituent frequencies in Philly.
California is a completely different animal because the regional transit agencies are so balkanized that stringing together 'a' corridor is nearly an exercise in futility. Metrolink, for an example, is an optics-unified commuter rail system...but its individual routes fall under up to 4 different regional transit agencies like PRIAA run-amok at the county level. "Amtrak California" exists at all as a semi-breakaway brand because of the way Caltrans has to hustle cooperation between umpteen different Joint ____ Corridor Authority boards to string anything together. It could not be more alien to how East Coast transit is organized by either statewide or 'mega' district chunking.
We learn to purpose-fit because that's how shit actually gets done. Waiting for some mythical Daddy to do it for us by running roughshod over every obstacle for damn sure isn't going to bring the results. You can hate PRIAA for its maddening pitfalls of needing the funding to percolate through the states before being applied, but let's at least be clear where that bile gets directed before screaming that we'd have all our transpo candy if only some Daddy ran roughshod hard enough over it. Daddy isn't in charge of that; the law has to wholesale-change before you can put him there.
