Amtrak's Maintenance Shops Are 15 Years Behind Its New Trains

Amtrak is spending at least $8 billion on three new train fleets -- NextGen Acela, Airo, and new Long Distance equipment -- funded in large part by the 2021 Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act⧉, which gave the company $22 billion in one-time capital money.▸ To service those trains, Amtrak is separately spending roughly $4 billion upgrading the maintenance shops that keep them running. Amtrak's Office of Inspector General⧉ -- the company's independent, congressionally established internal watchdog -- found the two efforts were never planned together: shop planning began roughly 15 years after fleet planning, even though the inspector general calls the two 'closely interconnected.' The consequence, as of the December 2025 audit: Amtrak can run only the first 24 of 28 new NextGen Acela trainsets, and only the first 12 of 83 new Airo trainsets, before it runs out of places to service them.

Amtrak began planning to replace its aging Acela and regional fleets as early as 2010.▸ It did not begin planning the shop upgrades those new trains would require until after it signed the equipment contracts -- 2016 for NextGen Acela, 2021 for Airo -- and even then, each shop was planned on its own, without an overarching facilities strategy. FRA⧉ (the Federal Railroad Administration, Amtrak's federal regulator and the agency that administers the grants funding these upgrades) told the company as much in a December 2024 presentation, instructing it to adopt 'stronger, holistic planning processes' to avoid repeating past mistakes. A senior Capital Delivery official put the resulting mismatch to auditors more plainly: it was, the official said, like 'building a house without ensuring the garage fits the vehicles.'

NextGen Acela trainsets began carrying passengers in August 2025; Airo trainsets are due to start in 2026.▸ Amtrak did not assign design staff to the Airo maintenance facilities -- four of which double as NextGen Acela shops -- until nearly a year after planning began, and later had to pause construction on 21 Airo facilities to fix design flaws, a 10-to-13-month delay. The upshot, per the audit: on the current schedule, Amtrak can operate the first 24 of 28 NextGen Acela trainsets and the first 12 of 83 Airo trainsets without any more shop capacity; past that point, new trainsets already paid for may have to sit idle intermittently over Airo's first four years in service. Amtrak's inspector general has flagged this exact risk before -- it previously found that delivery delays on NextGen Acela 'likely resulted in millions of dollars of foregone revenue,' money the company doesn't recover just because the train eventually arrives.

Amtrak has only priced out the largest tier of shops so far -- six 'Level 1' facilities in Washington, Boston, Philadelphia, Seattle, New York, and Rensselaer, ranging from a $206 million project in Rensselaer (still 'in planning,' due March 2031) to a $1.25 billion New York project whose contract was 'just awarded,' due October 2030.▸ Summed, those six alone equal $3.5 billion -- about 88% of the $4 billion the company has budgeted for the entire National Facilities program. Amtrak says it will need at least 15 more, smaller 'Level 2' shops just to support Airo, and has not yet determined what those will cost. Meanwhile, the program has no shared schedule and no cross-site risk register: three of the five Level 1 sites auditors visited independently flagged the same risks -- site-access constraints, unknown underground conditions -- without any process to pool that knowledge, and in May 2025 Amtrak reported cutting its management workforce even as the coordination gap remained open.