Vice President Joe Biden speaks Friday at Joseph R. Biden Jr. Railroad Station in Wilmington, Delaware. —Brendan Smialowski / AFP / Getty Images

WASHINGTON — A new era of high-speed train travel is coming to the nation’s busiest rail corridor.

Federal officials Friday announced a $2.45 billion loan to Amtrak for the purchase of state-of-the-art trains to replace the aging Acela trains that use the Northeast Corridor from Washington to Boston.

Amtrak plans to put the first of 28 new trains into service in about five years. Once they are fully deployed, officials expect the Acela to depart every half-hour between Washington and New York and every hour between New York and Boston. That should increase passenger capacity by about 40 percent, they said.

While the new trains will not approach the speeds of some Asian and European trains, officials said they hoped that the new Acela would travel at 160 mph in some places, up from 135 mph now. The trains will theoretically be able to go faster than 160 mph, though that would require a huge upgrade of the track system.


Vice President Joe Biden, a longtime Amtrak supporter who frequently travels by train between Washington and his home in Delaware, announced the loan at the station in Wilmington that is named in his honor.

“We need these kinds of investments to keep this region — and our whole country — moving, and to create new jobs,” Biden said.

A worker takes a photo of a scale model of the next generation high speed Amtrak train. —Brendan Smialowski / AFP / Getty Images

Anthony R. Coscia, Amtrak’s chairman, said the railroad service was “responding to a change in the United States of people moving into the cities, of people looking for city-to-city connections.”

The Acela trains have become one of the most successful parts of the Amtrak system. Over the last decade, they have helped train service displace airplanes as the most popular mode of travel in the Northeast Corridor. Acela trains carry about 3.4 million passengers a year between the three major cities.

But nearly 15 years after America’s first high-speed trains began coursing between Washington and Boston, the 20 current Acela trains are nearing the end of their usable lives.

Transportation officials said Amtrak first considered overhauling the existing Acela trains, 17 of which are operating at any given time. But that would have been disruptive and costly, the officials said.

The new trains will be manufactured in New York state by Alstom, a French company that builds high-speed trains around the globe. For Amtrak, Alstom will build a version of the Avelia Liberty, which the company’s website describes as having “an innovative compact power car and nine passenger cars, with the possibility of three more being added if demand grows.” The company says the train is capable of traveling at 186 mph.


Like the existing Acela trains, the new ones will have business-class cars, a cafe car, a first-class car and a quiet car, where the use of cellphones is discouraged. The new trains will also offer better accessibility for people with disabilities.

Officials said about $2 billion would be spent on the new trains. The rest of the loan will be used to upgrade several stations, including those in New York and Washington, and to improve track reliability and safety.

Amtrak expects increased revenue from the more frequent Acela service to help it pay back the loan, the biggest in the history of the Transportation Deparment, officials said.

The existing Acela trains will be phased out by the end of 2022, they said.

“This is a serious, serious upgrade,” Biden said. “You would need seven more lanes on I-95 to accommodate the traffic if Amtrak shut down.”