(Bloomberg News circulated the following column by James S. Russell on May 6. Mr. Russell is Bloomberg’s U.S. architecture critic.)
BOSTON — Just minutes from New York, my Boston- bound train climbs gently onto the majestic Hell Gate Bridge, with the towers of Manhattan emerging between the cables of the parallel Triborough Bridge. This vista alone could make you a rail convert.
The exasperations of air travel today also could do the trick. Having spent too many hours gazing at taxiways that did not move beneath me, I abandoned the airlines for Amtrak’s Acela on some recent business trips. With air delays predicted to be the worst ever this summer, could the rickety U.S. passenger-rail service be considered a contender?
You will not mistake Acela, Amtrak’s flagship Boston-to- Washington line, for a Japanese bullet train or a French TGV. Those trains hit speeds as high as 187 miles per hour; Acela rarely tops 125. That puts you in Midtown Manhattan 2 hours and 45 minutes after leaving Washington. The New York-to-Boston segment times out at just over 3 1/2 hours.
Those times beat driving and often flying. Yet Amtrak also attracts flyers as they rediscover some of rail’s old-fashioned virtues and comforts.
A high-school gym offers more charm than New York’s cramped Pennsylvania Station, yet I bless its lack of security-checkpoint lines. You won’t be patted down or need to surrender your shampoo because it doesn’t fit in a quart-size baggie. (Roving security teams may randomly pull boarding passengers aside for screening, Amtrak spokeswoman Carina Romero says.)
Business-Class Space
Acela’s modern, big-windowed cars are airy, with regular seats comparable to airline business class in size and legroom. Even if your train is late (though Acela’s on-time record is now better than competing airline shuttles) you aren’t strapped bolt upright in your seat while awaiting the takeoff announcement that never seems to come.
Then there’s the scenery: Eastern Connecticut and Rhode Island offer classic New England scenes of fishing shacks perched over peaceful swan-dotted inlets.
Southbound from New York, the train gets intimate with plenty of industrial decrepitude. For those who don’t find that as fascinating as I do, catch the Philadelphia skyline soaring behind a charming string of rowing clubs lining the Schuylkill River. The train hurtles across wide inlets of the Chesapeake Bay in Maryland, scattering snowy, long-legged egrets.
Acela’s ride is quiet and turbulence-free yet noticeably jiggly compared with good European intercity trains. Amtrak supplies electrical outlets, though no music feeds or video. While you shouldn’t expect real food, the choice of snacks and beverages on the train is wider than in the air.
Mobile-Phone Chatter
If you like to hear attorneys broadcast courtroom strategy and lobbyists lay out sieges of Congress, the New York-Washington trains can sound like a rolling extension of K Street. Preferring to avoid incessant mobile-phone chatter (mercifully still missing from the air), I choose the phone-forbidden “quiet car.”
My trains were full or nearly so. Many peak-hour trains sell out even after price hikes. A last-minute round-trip ticket for the 250 miles from New York to Washington can set you back $500.
Competing flights — shuttles run by Delta and US Airways — spend only 40 minutes in the air, though scheduled times can range as long as 1 hour, 25 minutes. That reflects the ever- lengthening wait for takeoff, mainly at LaGuardia, which now has among the nation’s worst flight delays.
Flying can’t be counted on to have a time advantage when you add waits at security checkpoints and travel to and from the airport. You’ll pay dearly for the promise of speed, though — almost $700 round trip for a last-minute ticket.
Right now, no other rail corridors in the U.S. match Acela for speed, comfort or frequency. Overburdened airports, along with jammed highways, high gasoline prices and global-warming concerns, may at last push longstanding plans to build fast train service between heavily trafficked urban markets like Los Angeles-San Francisco-Sacramento, Houston-Dallas, St. Louis- Chicago-Detroit and Florida’s east coast.
Yes, Acela is better, though by international standards it remains a joke. It looks good today mainly because driving and flying are looking so bad.