Airos Head Northeast for Commissioning Tests

by Jim Mathews/President & CEO

When you win a battle to secure investment funding and it takes years for that money to get spent, it can make you forget what you won. But this week, less than two months after watching Next Gen Acelas take to the rails in the Northeast Corridor for their first revenue service, Amtrak’s new Airo made its way to the Northeast Corridor for operational testing – a real milestone on the way to carrying its first paying passengers on the West Coast next year.

All of our hard work and advocacy and investment is beginning to be tangible, with real trains coming online that you can see, hear, and touch. As Amtrak President Roger Harris told attendees at our RailNation: San Antonio event earlier this month, “This is the first time in decades that Americans can see their [rail] tax dollars at work."

The first Airo trainset left the Federal Railroad Administration’s Transportation Technology Center test track in Pueblo, Colo., earlier this week after months of safety and engineering certification tests, passing through Chicago – and Chicago’s new car wash! – on Thursday on its way to complete several more months of operational tests along the Northeast Corridor.

Amtrak will base the Airo test train at Philadelphia’s Penn Coach Yard facility (itself also getting a huge infrastructure investment) during this test phase, and later it will be joined by a second Airo train to complete commissioning testing before entry into service early next year on the Cascades service in the Pacific Northwest between Eugene, Ore., and Vancouver, B.C.

With 83 trainsets being built, Amtrak is planning a five-year rollout across several corridors beginning with the Cascades. Then they’ll start running on other state-supported services and in the Northeast Corridor, replacing Regional consists. In addition to the Cascades and the Regionals, these new trainsets are expected to run on the Palmetto, plus the state-supported Adirondack, Carolinian, Downeaster, Empire Service, Ethan Allen Express, Keystone Service, Maple Leaf, New Haven/Springfield Service (Amtrak Hartford Line and Valley Flyer), Pennsylvanian, Vermonter, and Virginia services.

These Airo trainsets are beautiful and comfortable, but they’ll offer passengers more than just a cosmetic upgrade. The ride will be smoother, and it will also be faster – 125 miles per hour in many places. Better still, the dual-mode power system means no more waiting around for changing locomotives between overhead catenary and diesel in places like Harrisburg, Pa., or Washington, D.C.

It's exciting for Amtrak, and exciting for passengers. But I hope the next time you’re talking to a Mayor, a local transportation official, or your member of Congress, you’re able to point out that building the Airo is already, today, creating real jobs in manufacturing centers around the country. It represents a supply chain, an industrial base, that’s taken more than a decade to coax into life and we need to keep on buying trains in order to keep those lines going. Letting them close down would mean waiting ten more years and spending billions more dollars to rebuild the supply chain the next time we have to buy trains, so the smartest and most cost-effective thing we can do is to keep on investing in new capacity for passengers around the country.