A record number of Americans took the train this year, says a new report released by Amtrak on Monday.
Amtrak says that ridership increased by 6 percent in the 2010 fiscal year with 28.7 million passengers opting to take the train instead of driving or flying.
A large volume of riders came from business travelers in the Northeast, as high fuel prices and wireless Internet on Acela Express trains lured travelers away from air travel in Amtrak’s lucrative Boston-New York-Washington market.
In the Northeast overall, ridership went up 4.3 percent and ridership on the Amtrak’s fastest train, the Acela, was up by more than 6.5 percent.
Though travel between Boston and Washington accounted for a third of all Amtrak ridership, the company says all rail lines around the country experienced growth this year.
The growth in ridership brought the company’s ticket revenue up 9 percent to a record $1.74 billion in sales for a period that begin in October 2009 and ended in September of this year. Ticket revenue from the Northeast brought in $899.1 million to Amtrak, which accounted for 52 percent of total revenue.
In addition to announcing its ridership and revenue gains, Amtrak also stated it would continue to make capital investments to increase its capacity by adding new routes and expanding existing services. The company also plans to improve its aging infrastructure by purchasing new rail cars.
Amtrak has been buoyed in the last few years by an increase of government subsidies and support from the Obama Administration. In January of this year, President Obama awarded $8 billion in grants to jump-start high-speed rail infrastructure projects across the country.
Among the infrastructure projects proposed by Amtrak is $117 billion plan to link Boston and New York with a 220 mile per hour high-speed train. The proposed train would take riders from the Big Apple to Boston in just 86 minutes.
This year, Amtrak received just under $1.5 billion in federal subsidies. Over the same period, the federal government spent about $40.7 billion on the Federal Highway Program, a figure that does not include additional stimulus funds.
By Adriana Padilla at PeterGreenberg.com.
Related links: Washington Post, Reuters
Related Links on PeterGreenberg.com:
- Train Travel section
- Amtrak’s East Coast High-Speed Rail Plan
- Obama’s State of the Union: New High-Speed Rail Projects
- All Aboard for American High-Speed Rail
- When Amtrak Is The Better Travel Option
- Amtrak’s Top 5 and Bottom 5 On-Time Train Routes
- Will High-Speed Rail Corridor Rankings Mean More Trains In Your City?
