Amtrak: The World’s Most Expensive Lesson in How Not to Run a Railroad

Amtrak: How a Rust-Belt Railroad Became the World’s Most Expensive Metaphor

From the bullet-train penthouses of Tokyo to the velvety sleepers of the Moscow–Paris route, the planet has more or less agreed on what a national rail service should do: move citizens quickly, cheaply, and without the existential dread that accompanies a middle seat on a budget airline. Enter Amtrak—America’s federally chartered nostalgia ride—whose chief export appears to be sobering perspective for every other nation whose trains actually arrive on the same calendar day.

Let us first acknowledge the global context. High-speed rail is now the diplomatic flex of choice for countries that wish to announce, “We are capable of collective action.” China quietly laid more track last week than Amtrak has managed since the Bee Gees were on the charts. France’s SNCF runs so smoothly that strikes feel choreographed. Even Morocco—Morocco!—operates a 320 km/h Al Boraq service that could get you from Casablanca to Tangier in the time it takes an Acela to crawl from Manhattan’s Penn Station to Newark, a distance roughly equivalent to a decent sneeze.

And yet Amtrak persists, like a stubborn mule wearing a tuxedo. Its annual congressional appropriation is the legislative equivalent of slipping a twenty into your alcoholic uncle’s pocket: everyone knows where the money will really go, but the family feels better pretending it’s for groceries. The result is a rolling museum where the exhibits creak, the Wi-Fi coughs, and the dining car serves a microwaved burger whose spiritual ancestor died sometime during the Clinton administration.

International investors watch this spectacle with the morbid fascination usually reserved for slow-motion train wrecks—which, in Amtrak’s case, is more of a branding risk than a metaphor. The carrier’s long-distance routes lose about a dollar per passenger per mile, a metric so elegantly dismal it could be modern art. Deutsche Bahn executives reportedly keep Amtrak’s profit-and-loss charts pinned above their espresso machines as a motivational poster: “See? Could be worse.”

But the broader significance transcends mere inefficiency. Amtrak is America’s unconscious confession that it no longer believes in the future as a shared project. While other nations pour concrete for the generations they hope to have, the United States still debates whether paying train conductors a living wage is socialism or merely quaint. The rest of the planet reads this as a geopolitical tea leaf: if a superpower cannot coordinate two parallel strips of steel without threatening bankruptcy, how will it coordinate a climate response, or a supply chain, or—heaven help us—an evacuation?

Climate diplomats, bless their renewable hearts, continue to cite Amtrak as an underutilized weapon against carbon emissions. The argument is mathematically sound yet emotionally delusional: persuading Americans to abandon their SUVs for a service famously slower than driving is like asking pandas to consider a keto diet. Still, the symbolism matters. Every time a European delegation boards the Acela—lured by glossy brochures promising “world-class service”—they disembark in D.C. looking ashen, like tourists who’ve paid for the Louvre and been shown a crayon sketch of the Mona Lisa. They leave understanding that American exceptionalism now refers mainly to the exceptions America will make for itself.

There is, of course, a perverse pride in all this. Amtrak’s stubborn survival is a testament to the national talent for monetizing disappointment: gift shops sell “I Survived the Lake Shore Limited” mugs; influencers live-tweet delays for clout; comedians mine the café car’s existential despair for Netflix specials that finance their next flight. Late capitalism has discovered you can sell the delay as a feature if the branding is ironic enough.

And so the world keeps watching. Foreign correspondents file dispatches from Amtrak’s cracked vinyl seats, composing elegies for a republic that once built interstate highways and now can’t quite manage inter-county ones. They note the way passengers, resigned to fate, treat the conductor’s apology like communion: hollow, repetitive, but weirdly comforting. Somewhere between Albany and Schenectady, the train slows to a contemplative 12 mph, and even the most hardened cynic feels a flicker of something—pity, perhaps, or recognition. This, too, is a kind of diplomacy: the quiet admission that we are all on board the same derailed timeline, clutching a ticket stamped “non-refundable” in a language nobody bothered to translate.