Biden to announce $16 billion for Amtrak rail improvements in Northeast Corridor

The federal government plans to pump more than $16 billion into improving the nation’s busiest rail line.

President Joe Biden is expected to announce the funding at an event in Delaware on Monday.  The funding will go into more than two dozen projects along the Northeast Corridor – the Amtrak system that connects cities including Washington, New York and Boston.

The announcement will be delivered as part of an event Monday in New Castle, Delaware, at Amtrak Bear Maintenance Shops, an 85-acre campus where trains are maintained and repaired. Delaware Gov. John Carney and Sens. Chris Coons and Tom Carper will attend the event.

The Biden administration said it selected projects including aging bridges and tunnels in need of replacement and said the $16.4 billion includes funding from the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law.

The funding “will upgrade aging infrastructure on the nation’s most heavily traveled rail corridor to increase train speeds, reduce passenger delays, and create good-paying union jobs,” said a White House official.

Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg said the projects are “critical” and “represent some of the most frequent causes of problems and disruptions and delays.”

The largest slice of funding will go to the underwater train tunnels connecting New York and New Jersey.  The Gateway Hudson River Tunnel – which the Amtrak CEO has said would cause “meltdown” if it failed – is more than a century old and is corroding after flooding during Superstorm Sandy more than a decade ago.  The $3.8 billion grant follows another federal award of nearly $7 billion this summer.

The funding also includes $4.7 billion toward replacing a Civil War-era tunnel near Baltimore. The Baltimore and Potomac Tunnel is flooding and sinking and frequently slows trains into the city to a crawl, causing delays up and down the line. Completion of the new tunnel is expected in 2033.

Other projects to be funded include replacing a 100-year-old bridge in Maryland and a 116-year-old bridge in Connecticut.

“Americans need and deserve world-class rail, which is the president’s vision,” Buttigieg told reporters. “But for decades now, we have underinvested as a country in passenger rail in the United States.”