Trump's feud with New York masks Amtrak's spending spree

President Donald Trump’s long-running feud with New York over the $16 billion Gateway tunnel masks a turn of events that even executives at Amtrak didn’t see coming: The administration is largely staying out of the way as the railroad undertakes a building spree unmatched in its more than 50-year history.

While the showdown over Gateway drags on, government-owned Amtrak is flush with some $33 billion it received for capital projects under the Biden-era bipartisan infrastructure law — funding that survived DOGE — and is putting that cash to work.

The latest evidence of that is in Baltimore. After months of negotiations, Amtrak and its construction partners have agreed to cut $1 billion out of what is expected to be a more than $6 billion rail tunnel beneath the city, a concession that clears the way for a project critical to rail travelers across the region. With that, Amtrak last week green-lit its tunneling contractor to begin mobilizing the boring machines that will replace the 153-year-old Baltimore & Potomac Tunnel, a dilapidated structure the company calls the worst bottleneck on the Northeast Corridor, a potential “single point of failure” for 15 million riders.

Amtrak has had to trim some of its plans, under scrutiny from officials in the Department of Transportation, including Federal Railroad Administration chief David Fink. But those compromises have meant that major projects are still advancing, despite fears that a company so closely associated with former President Joe Biden — an Amtrak rider for decades — would be doomed under Trump.

“We ended up convincing the administration that, yes, this was Biden’s pet project, but it is actually important and necessary to the corridor, which is owned by DOT and therefore we have their support to move forward,” said Laura Mason, Amtrak’s executive vice president for capital delivery, referring to the Baltimore tunnel.

That wasn’t a given — especially for a project in Democrat-dominated Maryland and with a Trump administration that’s focused on improving infrastructure for cars and is generally hostile to public transit. Hints of how that détente emerged, and the leverage the Trump administration brought to bear on Amtrak, are everywhere.

At the behest of the FRA, and to lower the Baltimore project’s cost by $1 billion, Amtrak agreed to eliminate a large ventilation structure, delay associated infrastructure upgrades and alter the tunnel’s design to push some costs off until a future, as-yet unfunded expansion, is approved, Amtrak and federal officials said.

The elimination of the ventilation plant also defuses a fight with residents in West Baltimore who opposed the structure on the grounds that it would pollute the neighborhood.

Rail officials also took more subtle steps to lower friction with the federal government.

As the Trump administration railed against diversity, equity and inclusion policies last year, Amtrak officials began referring to the project as the “B&P Tunnel Replacement Program,” rather than the official name bestowed on the structure in 2021: the Frederick Douglass Tunnel. Officials were concerned that direct references to the Black, Maryland-born abolitionist and orator could put the project in the administration’s crosshairs, people who worked on the project said.

An Amtrak spokesman said the neither the future tunnel’s name, nor the internal references to replacing the B&P Tunnel had changed. By January, as the administration’s anti-DEI rhetoric began to wane, FRA itself referred to the project using Douglass’ name.

The compromises — which kept the project alive instead of sparking more legal battles — show how a functional relationship has taken hold between Amtrak officials and Fink, who entered office last year with a mandate to examine the railway’s operations and capital project costs.

“We’ve had some disagreements, but we’ve always gotten to yes,” Fink said in an interview. “We ask a lot of questions, we’re getting a lot of answers, and we’re working together making sure the taxpayer dollars are well spent.”

It’s not just in Maryland that Amtrak is pressing ahead.

In March, Amtrak and officials from New Jersey celebrated the opening of the first track over the new Portal North Bridge. The span over the Hackensack River between Newark and New York will replace a 116-year old swing bridge that is a major source of delays for Amtrak and NJ Transit.

Early construction has also started on replacement bridges over the Susquehanna and Connecticut Rivers, along with major overhauls to William H. Gray III 30th Street Station in Philadelphia and Baltimore’s Penn Station. Thirteen of 28 new trains for Amtrak’s Acela express service are now operating on the Northeast Corridor.

Out west, construction workers recently topped out on the framing of a massive new maintenance facility in Seattle, which will serve the first of a new fleet of passenger cars being built by Siemens AG at its factories in California and North Carolina. Similar buildings are under construction or in planning in Washington, Philadelphia, Boston and New York.

The moves coincide with a post-COVID surge in ridership, which hit a record 34.5 million customer trips in the latest fiscal year, while ticket revenue rose to $2.7 billion.

Despite much of the capital funding coming from the Biden era — or perhaps because it was already appropriated — Trump officials haven’t been shy about embracing a railroad that is finally upgrading and replacing equipment and structures in use for decades.

Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy posed for the cameras aboard the inaugural run of a long-delayed new fleet of high-speed Acela trains last year. His deputy secretary, Steven Bradbury, helped unveil the first of a new fleet of cars that will eventually replace the roughly half-century-old “Amfleet” coaches used on regional lines.

Fink has been a regular visitor to Amtrak’s construction sites, too, including the Portal North bridge, and the four-track East River Tunnels in Manhattan, where the railroad has rebuilt one of the tubes heavily damaged in Hurricane Sandy, with plans to take a second tube out of service and rebuild it later this year. The administrator has also taken the railroad’s side in disputes with commuter railroads who share its tracks about the need to remove tracks completely from service in order to make repairs more efficiently.

All those efforts stand in contrast to the most high-profile dispute between the administration and passenger rail operators: Trump’s attempt to freeze federal payments for the Gateway Program, the project to build a new Hudson rail tunnel and also rehabilitate the existing 116-year-old passage.

The Gateway Development Commission, of which Amtrak is a partner, is fighting Trump’s attempt to renege on federal reimbursement for the project, and prevailed earlier this year in an attempt to restart the flow of funds while the parties battle it out in federal claims court. The commission recently approved a $1.29 billion construction contract.

Betting that Gateway will eventually progress, Amtrak is using its capital funds to build a massive rectangular concrete box up to 80 feet (24 meters) below the street in New York City’s Hudson Yards — a casing that will preserve space for a future tunnel to pass under a district of skyscrapers and into Penn Station.

Yet that high-profile standoff has continued to fuel doubts about the administration’s ultimate plans for the railroad.

People familiar with the matter said the administration has made clear that it doesn’t want to focus on expanding service into new corridors between cities across the country — priorities of both the previous Amtrak leadership and the Biden administration.

After pushing Amtrak CEO Stephen Gardner to step down early in Trump’s second term, the administration has suggested that more management changes could be coming, without providing details.

“We’re looking at doing a much broader, bigger kind of Amtrak restructuring,” said Drew Feeley, the deputy administrator of the Federal Railroad Administration, at a conference in February.

Trump has signaled that he wants the administration to have control over the company's plans for a replacement for New York's Penn Station, the busiest rail station in the country. Amtrak has received submissions from three teams competing to be named master developer of the new station. An Amtrak spokesman said officials will announce a winner in June.

For now, the company seems cognizant of the moment it is in and is pushing forward.

“In transportation, what ends up happening is that you have famine, so you don’t get to invest in anything for a long time,” Mason said. “And then you have the feast, and understandably people design like, ‘Well, if I don’t know when I’m going to get money again, I need to build the biggest, most robust thing possible.’”