Update on trains in western Massachusetts (effective May 28, 2024):
Amtrak is adding a new weekday Valley Flyer round trip between New Haven and Greenfield, which is great news.
Train 486 will operate northbound in the late afternoon and stop in Holyoke at 4.48 pm, Northampton at 5.04 pm, and arrive in Greenfield at 5.30 pm.
The new train will take some of the load of the Vermonter which often carries a great many riders who step off the train in Greenfield or Northampton. On busy travel days this should free up seats for people using the Vermonter to travel to Vermont.
This train set will then become southbound train 479 which will depart Greenfield at 6.05 pm, and stop in Northampton at 6.30 pm, Holyoke at 6.45 pm, Springfield at 7.13 pm and then make all stops to New Haven where it will connect with Amtrak Northeast Regional train 179 to New York Penn Station.
With this new southbound Valley Flyer train it will be possible to travel in the evening from Greenfield, Northampton, and Holyoke to New York City for the first time since the 1960s.
Plans to extend Amtrak service deeper into Maine (past Brunswick) will not come to fruition any time soon.
Amtrak service to Montreal is shut down during the entire summer. The blame game is in full swing.
Still no word on whether Amtrak will ever begin service to Mobile, Alabama. But the local first responders will pretend like it actually will, just in case it ever does, for incident simulation purposes. Amtrak hasn’t served Mobile since 2005, so the vast majority of local cops, firefighters and EMTs have never experienced a passenger train.
No surprise here - the proposed Amtrak route between New Orleans and Mobile appears to have been “suspended indefinitely”, a victim of “conscious uncoupling” between the desire for rail service and the political reality of southern aversion to federal programs.
A new center platform has opened at Worcester, Massachusetts Union Station. This station is primarily served by MBTA regional rail, but it also has two Amtrak trains each day (one headed towards Boston South Station, the other towards Chicago Union Station).
Tracks have yet to be laid on the other side of the center platform.
More trains now stopping at Newark airport station, with the connection to the historic AirTrain
Trains on the Burlington, VT line have had their schedule adjusted. Some of the schedule padding has been removed.
Ethan Allen Express southbound Train 290 will now depart Burlington 20 minutes earlier at 9:50 a.m., arriving in Rutland 35 minutes earlier, 30 minutes earlier in Albany, and will reach Moynihan Train Hall in New York City at 5:17 p.m., which is 30 minutes earlier than the previous schedule. In addition, northbound Ethan Allen Express Train 291 will arrive at Burlington five minutes earlier at 9:50 p.m.
“Ground broken” on the NC portion of Richmond-Raleigh passenger rail. Not really sure what this means since design work will not be done until 2027. I think it’s just a political stunt, or maybe “groundbreaking” doesn’t mean what I think it means. In any case, this will allow passenger trains to go directly between the two southern state capitals, but I imagine it will be a decade or longer until trains actually do so.
Amtrak awarded a contract to rehabilitate the East River tunnels. There are four East River tunnels, unlike the two Hudson ones so it will be easier to do repair work here. This project is separate from the Gateway Project.
