It Was a Good Year for Trains. Here’s How We Covered It.

Here’s a roundup of big stories—with links—from a boffo year for passenger trains in general and high-speed rail in particular.

California and Canada

The year began with the Trump administration clawing back $4 billion in funding for California’s high-speed project. The state pushed back and announced plans to accelerate construction and move up the project’s timeline by attracting private investment. Our coverage of California plan’s is here; and see this essay for an analysis of the project’s big-picture significance.

CNN included the San Francisco-Los Angeles project in a story that described three potential high-speed rail routes. The other two were Chicago-New York and Atlanta-Orlando. Read our thoughts on the CNN piece here, and see our take on a Chicago-New York high-speed line. At the same time, Canada got serious in 2025 about building a Toronto-Quebec City high-speed line. Called Alto, Canada HSR had its first public meeting in August. Alto announced in December that the first, 125-mile segment will run from Montreal to Ottawa. Construction will begin in 2029.

Illinois and Chicago

In the heartland, the Illinois General Assembly approved a $1.5 billion – a year – package for trains and transit. As we wrote, it “did something more profound than stabilize budgets or prevent service cuts. It fundamentally reconceived the role of passenger rail and public transportation in the state’s economic and social fabric—and wrote that vision directly into law.” The law also “creates institutional machinery—committees, oversight officers, coordination mandates—designed to knit together trains, buses, sidewalks, and trails into a genuinely integrated transportation network.” Meanwhile, the Illinois High Speed Railway Commission continued to work on a feasibility study for a Chicago-St. Louis high-speed line. Scheduled for release in spring 2026, the study will give policymakers data and options.

The Alliance also continued our strong advocacy for big reforms to Chicago’s railroad infrastructure. Since the city is the nation’s railroad hub, major upgrades will boost the local and regional economy and improve passenger-rail routes nationally. In January, Alliance executive director Rick Harnish hosted a webinar on fixing Chicago Union Station. “We have for a long time thought this should be the start and the center of high-speed rail across the country, and we think it’s really critical” to make it a world-class facility, he said. Harnish also argued that the station should be reconfigured to handle 10 times more passengers than it currently does, and that it’s reasonable to expect 10 times more ridership on trains arriving in/departing from Chicago within 10 years. See also our pieces on the need for a new (Van Buren St.) entrance to Chicago Union Station and the need for a new concourse. Building on an essay that we wrote for Crain’s Chicago, we also argued for upgrades to Chicago’s transit system, Metra, to leverage the big investments by Chicago and Illinois in making the region a hub of quantum computing. “Metra must become electrified regional rail. That is, it should serve all kinds of people—students, workers, shoppers—with departures every 10 minutes. It should run all through the day, not just during rush hours,” we wrote. “It should be electrified. And key lines should connect with major regional institutions. A modernized Metra—with fast, frequent, and low-emissions trains—will open up all kinds of collaborative possibilities for Quantum Park.” See also our companion piece on Metra’s South Chicago Branch and the Illinois Quantum Campus.

Amtrak

Amtrak rolled out its much anticipated NextGen Acela trains, with top speeds of 160 mph, in the Northeast Corridor. Amtrak also set a record for ridership this year, with 34.5 million passengers—a 5% increase over 2024 and 2 million more riders than the previous record, set in 2019. While we celebrated these accomplishments, we also noted that Amtrak could increase ridership by buying more trainsets. This was a common refrain throughout the year: Amtrak needs to ramp up its rolling stock. We made the argument for state-supported routes, which are experiencing rapid ridership growth, especially in the Chicago region. And we made it for long-distance routes: “Without new coaches—soon—older units will age beyond repair,” we wrote. “Damaged coaches will continue to be removed from service. The already strained capacity will diminish further. Amtrak needs to order at least 1,086 new units immediately—including coaches, dining cars, sleeper cars and lounge cars—for its long-distance routes.” See also our related webinar, Overnight Sleeper Trains’ Role in America’s Transportation Infrastructure.

From dream to reality

2025 was notable for several lively and well-attended Alliance webinars on a wide range of topics. In probably the most popular Alliance webinar in 2025, railway engineer and author Gareth Dennis elaborated his thesis (drawn from his book How the Railways will Fix the Future) that trains are the “one big powerful tool” that can solve many of our world’s biggest challenges, including an epidemic of loneliness, climate change, and populist uprisings across the globe. Great trains are a solution because they catalyze “development that is focused on wealth-building and human well-being, not the needs of drivers,” as we write in the related blog post.

Translating theory into concrete results was one of the year’s big blog and webinar themes. For example, author and activist Carter Lavin discussed his book If You Want to Win, You’ve Got to Fight, which lays out strategies for building power and creating transformative change. And members of a Washington-based coalition explained how they pushed the state legislature to mandate big increases in the speed, reliability, and frequency of Amtrak’s Cascades line by 2035. The law calls for increasing the number of daily round trips between Seattle and Portland—from 6 to 14—and between Seattle and Vancouver, BC—from two to five. Read the related blog here, which distills their advice for building better state-supported Amtrak routes. On a related note, an Alliance correspondent asked in this essay how it’s possible that there is no usable train service connecting Chicago and Indianapolis—two cities with a (combined) population of more than 11 million people and a major research university right in the middle. And we covered the release of “a workable, cost-effective plan for a high-speed rail network in the Northeast Corridor,” released by the Transit Costs Project at New York University. It would cut travel time from Boston to Washington, DC to about four hours, versus the current time of nearly seven hours. See our related webinar, Momentum for Better Trains, based on a report that “seeks to speed service not by focusing on top speeds, but by focusing on increasing average speeds across a route.”

High speed rail 101

Finally, we covered several key stories and topics relevant to the nuts and bolts of developing high-speed and great conventional trains in North America. Topics included a Chinese train that goes into operation this year and will regularly run at 250 mph; why frequency is critical to making trains competitive with driving; the fastest trains in the world—defined not by maximum speed but by the start-to-stop time between station pairs on a scheduled weekday run; how high-speed trains slash carbon emissions; what defines high-speed rail; and the vast number of Americans—more than a third—who either can’t drive or have limited (or no) access to a car. And at the Alliance’s annual luncheon in January 2025, Naohisa Kitada, general manager of the Washington, DC, office of Central Japan Railway, discussed takeaways from more than 60 years of Japan’s Shinkansen trains.

Eight more notable pieces we published in 2025, briefly:

In Search of High Speed Rail: Make Trains Sexy Again: “I wanted to walk away from this trip with a clearer impression of how this kind of infrastructure can shape communities. And of course, as a railfan, I was eager to finally experience high-speed rail for the first time.”

In a Time of Crisis, California’s Visionary New Rail Plan Offers Hope: “On January 7, California released its new State Rail Plan. Years in the making, the Plan aims to connect California with fast, frequent trains and transit by 2050, using a statewide fleet of vehicles that produce zero emissions. Why is this so important, especially now?”

The Curious Case of the Capitol Corridor (part 3) We distill Part 1 and Part 2 of this series into the six keys to excellence for passenger-rail lines—based on an Amtrak line that went from zero to hero in the late 1990s and early 2000s.

Transit Makes, Keeps Homes Valuable: “In each metropolitan area studied, there was an absolute drop in residential property value from 2006-11 in non-transit areas, and increases ranging from 30% to 129% in the transit-served areas.”

Madison, WI, Station Site is Crucial to Developing Regional Rail: “What if Madison’s train station were the busiest place in town, with trains to and from Milwaukee and Chicago every hour, and to and from St. Paul at least 10 times each day? What if Madison’s civic, business, and activist communities got behind a transformative proposal like this, and worked with communities statewide to build support for it?”

You Really Expect Me to Drive to Louisville?: “Indiana moved heaven and earth, after all, to build a new highway that it believed was vital to the state’s future. It’s not crazy to believe it might one day get behind a real solution.”

Columbus, IN, needs regional rail: “Columbus currently has no train service. But it should. And it could. The city sits right in the middle of the Louisville-Indianapolis rail corridor, one of 69 passenger-rail routes accepted into the Federal Railroad Administration’s Corridor ID and Development Program.”

How trains could transform Cleveland: “Local civic and business leaders should work with the governor’s office, the legislature, and the Ohio Department of Transportation to establish great train service from Chicago to New York, via Cleveland, as part of the city’s bid to reinvent its downtown through the “Shore-to-Core-to-Shore” initiative.”

Our members made all of this coverage possible. Here’s to an even better 2026.

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