Amtrak’s ridership is touching record highs

At 7pm on aNECDC Friday night, the Illini service, a train that runs from southern Illinois to Chicago, ought to be pulling into the college city of Champaign. When your correspondent was on it in early March, it stopped short after the train coming in the opposite direction broke down. For three hours, passengers were trapped roughly 200 yards south of the station. At some point a student who had been loudly complaining to the conductor quietly opened the door and walked off into the night. A little after 10pm the train finally shunted its way to the platform and the rest of the passengers alighted. The next morning your by now rather grumpy correspondent proceeded to Chicago by bus.Such stories of travelling by train in America are sadly common. The world’s biggest economy has fewer miles of electrified railway than Iran. Only in the North East Corridor () between Boston and Washington, , do intercity trains run even vaguely like trains in other rich countries. Elsewhere, Mennonites, who do not use cars or fly, make up a remarkable share of passengers. And yet as bleak as it can seem, Amtrak, the national rail carrier, is in fact recovering well from the pandemic. In the latter half of last year, ridership was just 3% below its levels in 2019—previously the firm’s best-ever year. And through his infrastructure law of 2021 President Joe Biden, an Amtrak superuser as a senator, has put aside $66bn for investment in passenger-rail infrastructure. Is a new golden age of train travel down the tracks?