Skift Take
President Biden is living up to his nickname Amtrak Joe with some big dollars for new passenger rail service across the country.
Las Vegas travelers are a $3 billion step closer to speeding through the Mojave Desert on a high-speed train linking Sin City with Southern California.
Brightline West's Las Vegas-Southern California line is one of the 10 passenger rail projects across the U.S. that received $8.2 billion in federal grants Friday. Other projects include high-speed rail in California as well as new and upgraded corridors in North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Virginia. The Federal Railroad Administration also handed out another $34.5 million in planning grants to study new or expanded rail service on 69 corridors.
"If you’ve ever seen the standard of passenger rail service in Japan or Germany … and come home and said ‘Why can’t we have these nice things?’ This is the beginning of the answer to that," Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg said. "Help is on the way to make sure Americans have access to just as good rail service or better."
Buttigieg described the grants unveiled Friday as the "largest investment in passenger rail since Amtrak was created" in 1971.
The grants are a signature piece of President Biden’s Bipartisan Infrastructure Law. It included $66 billion for passenger rail infrastructure, the largest single investment in intercity rail in U.S. history. While most of those funds will go to upgrades and improvements to the Northeast Corridor, the law included $11.5 billion in funds over five years for the development and construction of new passenger rail lines elsewhere around the country.
Americans are eager for those new trains. In its results for the year ending in September, Amtrak reported record ridership on train lines where it had expanded service. This included lines in Connecticut, North Carolina, Vermont, and Virginia. And Brightline, which opened a ne