Biden celebrates and prepares to expand Amtrak despite decades of cost overruns and bad service

President Biden headed Friday to Philadelphia to celebrate Amtrak’s 50-year anniversary and push for better funding of rail service that has a decades-long history of red ink. 

So it's perhaps not surprising that tucked into Biden’s American Jobs Plan is $80 billion earmarked for Amtrak, funding the railway he has said is necessary to rebuild the Northeast Corridor and address $45 billion in backlogged repairs. Amtrak was founded in 1971 as a for-profit operation, but from that year through 2017, taxpayers footed an $81 billion bill, and the company has never turned a profit. Amtrak has traditionally relied upon annual appropriations to help pay for operations, including between $1.5 billion and nearly $2 billion in recent years. Part of the reason for the vast cost overruns is that more than one in four Amtrak trains -- and nearly half running long-distance routes -- are late. "On-time performance (OTP)1 of Amtrak’s (the company) trains has been a longstanding challenge for the company, which identifies poor OTP as a key factor driving its annual operating loss -- about $171 million in fiscal year (FY) 2018," according to an October 2019 report by Amtrak's inspector general. "In that year, 27 percent of the company’s trains were late, with some routes performing better than others."