Across the country, the stories play out simultaneously on a weekday morning: Two businessmen headed for the 8:03 Boston-bound Acela Express dive into the crowd at New York’s Penn Station; a cluster of Purdue University students shuffles down the platform at Lafayette, Ind., for a ride on the Hoosier State to Chicago; and a conductor on the northbound Coast Starlight peers into the predawn blackness of Dunsmuir, Calif., as a family approaches.
You’ll find these stories and more at the 508 different stations shown on this map of Amtrak’s passenger rail network. The stations are differentiated by ridership volume (totals on and off), based on information provided by Amtrak for the fiscal year ended Sept. 30, 2007, when the railroad carried a record 25.8 million people.
(Note: The figures omit five stations in Canada on the Maple Leaf’s route to Toronto and 12 stations not in use since the Sunset Limited was suspended east of New Orleans in 2005.)
Given the various levels of service and state financial support, Amtrak can be different things depending on where you live. It’s the railroad that fields a fleet of corridor trains up and down the East and West coasts (and, to a lesser extent, Chicago). And it’s the carrier that links big cities and small towns across the country with a network of 15 long-distance trains.
The station volumes clearly reflect this duality. Where service is frequent and reliable, people ride. It may not be a surprise to find 13 of the 30 stations that serve 1,000 or more riders a day located along the Boston-Washington Northeast Corridor, but look at how many there are between Los Angeles and San Diego!
Amtrak’s 12 busiest stations handled half of the railroad’s total boardings and detrainings last year. New York was at the top (with 8 million riders), followed by Washington, D.C. (4.1 million), and Philadelphia (3.7 million), then Chicago, Los Angeles, Boston South Station, Baltimore, Sacramento, San Diego, Albany-Rensselaer, Wilmington, and New Haven.
By contrast, even big cities like Dallas, Memphis, and Albuquerque can’t draw more than 250 daily riders when only one train a day runs in each direction.
Railroads included in this map:
Amtrak
