Train travel in the U.S. has a roller-coaster history. The concept was first tested on Christmas Day in 1830, with the grand opening of a passenger line by the South Carolina Canal and Railroad Company. Trains were fast, modern, and comfortable, and Americans fell in love with the new technology. A generation later, the “Golden Spike” was hammered into the Transcontinental Railroad in Promontory Summit, Utah; from that moment on, regular folks could board a train on one coast and cross the entire continent, no stagecoach required. The rail system chugged along for a century, connecting cities and large towns across the country.
By the 1960s, air travel and passenger cars were aggressively replacing passenger trains, and the robust rail network began to fall apart. Train travel might have vanished altogether, if not for the Rail Passenger Service Act of 1970, which led to the creation of Amtrak. This federal chartered corporation has limped along ever since, carrying passengers between major cities, most prominently in the northeast corridor. But the Amtrak network is only a fraction as large as the U.S. passenger rail system at its height, when the map of cross-country lines looked like a diagram of the human circulatory system.
This is starting to change: Amtrak announced some incredible travel train updates in 2023, and the All Aboard Act, if passed, is a new bill that could have huge positive implications for Amtrak. Enthusiasm for passenger rail is building, with an all-time record of 32.8 million trips taken in fiscal year 2024. As Amtrak attempts to improve service and even expand, it may set its sights on the states that currently have no service at all: South Dakota, Wyoming, Alaska, and Hawaii.
States without Amtrak railroad ties
Amtrak’s longer haul
On paper, Amtrak has a presence in the 46 other states as well as the District of Columbia, but its service is often minor, inconsistent, or far afield. Railway connects only the southern edge of West Virginia, the middle of Oklahoma, and the northern tip of Idaho. Many states have seasonal rail service or a “thruway bus,” a special bus line operated by Amtrak. For example, most service in Wisconsin, Tennessee, and Kentucky is made up of “connecting services,” which are separate from year-round passenger trains. Some stations see very little traffic, such as Sanderson, Texas, which reportedly received only 247 passengers in all of 2023.
It’s also fine to say that Amtrak has 500 stops along 21,000 miles of track, but what do these numbers actually mean? How do they compare to other railroad networks around the world? Little old Germany has 24,500 miles of passenger rail, much of it built in the past 30 years. Japan has about 19,000 miles and operates 46 of the 50 busiest stations in the world. Meanwhile, China has apparently broken the 100,000-mile mark, a lengthier network than the other three nations combined.
In short, Amtrak runs a pretty modest operation, and even adding a couple more states won’t put U.S. passenger rail in the big leagues. But train travel was once the preferred form of transport in the U.S., and Amtrak is inching toward a comeback. If the corporation can restore its long-lost western routes and add family-friendly amenities like changing tables to all lines, American rail might get back on track.
