WASHINGTON — Beginning today (Monday, March 4), Amtrak is scheduling four additional Northeast Regional round trips weekdays and two on the weekends between New York and Washington, D.C.
The decision to reconfigure seating in each coach so that half of the seats face in different directions [see “Fixed forward and backward seating to speed Northeast Regional equipment turns …,” Trains News Wire, Feb. 28, 2024] means trains can forego a time-consuming, non-revenue trip to a wye or loop track at Washington and New York, allowing trains to be sent back out more quickly.
Amtrak’s announcement of the additional service does not specify exactly when the new round trips are added. It also refers to a new early-morning weekday Philadelphia-to-New York departure and a Philadelphia-to-Boston train on the weekend, but it isn’t clear from the booking system what time of day these new frequencies are operating.
Three of the additional weekday round trips out of New York are morning departures interspersed with through trains from Springfield, Mass., and Boston. Their arrivals are timed for reversals to northbound departures at Washington of a little more than an hour. The weekend additions fill in some previously scheduled longer gaps.
The extra trains provide additional service to less frequently served intermediate stops, though the company still does not produce a downloadable grid timetable to show comparative speed vs. stop options at a glance.
Including Acela, here are the number of core Northeast Corridor trips Amtrak now operates:
The discrepancy occurs because some New York-bound long-distance trains are “discharge only” and do not accept passengers.
Since all they are doing is reconfiguring the seating arrangement in the Amfleet cars, adding more service as the trains do not need to be turned. As I used to be a frequent rider of the Keystone Service, I always hated to get stuck in the eight seats in the middle of the car as the amount the seats can recline is limited. It was almost as bad as sitting in the bulkhead seats at the end of a car.
It’s nice to see that Amtrak can add capacity to the NEC. It would be even nicer to see Amtrak add more capacity (not even trains, just more cars) to the almost always sold out long distance trains west of Chicago.
Now they need to add the sleeping car back to the Night Owl…
An excellent point.