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Americans are getting new trains
(media.amtrak.com)
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this post was submitted on 22 Aug 2025
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Top speed at 160 mph (approx 250 kmh). Not bad, US. Could be better but not bad. I couldn’t find specifics on how much faster the travel would get, but considering my personal and anecdotal experience with Amtrack, any new train is welcome.
tracks in the US usually have freight heavy rail on them, anyways, so you'll probably get 4 minutes at that speed before travelling 40mph for the rest of the trip. :/
The trains in article are the new high speed Acela trains that run on the northeast corridor. The northeast corridor is an electrified high speed rail corridor owned jointly by Amtrak and various state DOTs.
What you describe is the case for over 90% of Amtrak's network, but these trains are specifically made for the one section where that doesn't happen.
NEC corridor is not high-speed. The end-end average speed is only 70mph, which is pretty middling even for conventional rail.
Every source that I have found calls it a high speed rail. From checking openrailwaymap, the track speeds for most of the corridor are well above 100 mph. It is high speed rail. It's one of the worst high speed rail corridors in need of improvement, but it's still high speed rail.
According to the bog-standard UIC definition, HSR requires dedicated HSL running generally at 155+mph. UIC has a second definition that does allow for upgraded conventional lines running generally at 125mph in corridors without air competition. Acela meets neither of these metrics.
Even aside from the air competition issue, Acela's general overall speed is not over 125mph or even 100mph due to all the slow sections. For example:
Cool graph, where did you take it from? I wonder if there is a place with this type of graph for every line out there
aaahhh, okay; thank you! i am on the west cost where all trains go as fast as heavy freight, heh.
Not sure how much faster a DC - New York - Boston route would even need to be. They're making other stops along the way, so it's not like they can even spend that much time at max speed.
Now, LA - Vegas is a different story.
In Europe, fast trains have a max speed of 300 or even 350 (except Germany…), it doesn’t take long to accelerate. But the other commenter pointing out shared tracks with freight trains is on point. Having a higher max speed that you never reach is not going to be useful, that’s why I was wondering how much time is actually saved with these new trains