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Aaron Perry: "I didn’t notice any jolting or moving or anything like that in there.”
The shirt says it all: “I don’t always stop and look at trains…oh wait, yes I do.”
Aaron Perry had some free time Thursday morning, so he bought a $160 train ticket from Boston to New Haven and back again.
He, along with 385 other people, helped sell out a NextGen Acela train — which stopped by Union Station as part of a celebration of the new high-speed Amtrak upgrade.
“Things cleared up at work in a way where I was like, ‘Oh, I might actually be able to book this,’ ” Perry said, “and so on a whim I decided I want to try being on the first train out and see what it’s like.”
Amtrak’s new and improved high-speed train serves as an upgrade to the previous Acela while still including the same stops and pricing structure. Customers can expect smoother rides, more daily departures, 5G Wi-Fi, full accessibility, and 82 more seats, according to Amtrak’s Manager of Government Affairs Anabel Mamone. She also stated that riders will experience faster rides for some destinations.
The previous Amtrak Acela trains reached speeds of 150 miles per hour. The newly launched NextGen Acela is slated to top out at 160 miles per hour.
Thursday marked the official launch for NextGen’s revenue service.
This reporter spoke with Perry on the Track 1 platform at Union Station at 8:09 a.m. as he got off the train in New Haven. He came from Boston, two hours away on Acela.
Perry works on renewable energy in Boston and likes to travel by train both for environmental reasons and convenience. “It’s nice to go from city center to city center rather than having to go to the airport.” He uses trains to visit clients in Connecticut and friends in New York and D.C.
Like with the previous Acela, which launched in 2000, the NextGen traverses through the northeast corridor from Washington D.C. to Boston with stops in Philadelphia, New York City, New Haven, and Providence.
Deborah Berman commutes regularly from D.C. to New Haven as the director of Development and Alumni Affairs for the David Geffen School of Drama at Yale. “I’ve been commuting for 22 years,” she said. As an Amtrak regular, she knows many conductors and had often asked them about the new Acela. “This has been a long time coming,” she said.
Though some trains are faster, Berman said her ticket to D.C. says the trip will take 15 minutes longer than her usual commute. Still, she could not wait for the cleaner and more accessible train. She has a knee injury, so she found the tilt structure in the new train particularly appealing.
For Perry, he enjoyed the new structure while walking between cars. “It was sort of like it’s all one big connection. So I didn’t notice any jolting or moving or anything like that in there.”
As the train arrived at the station, one 10-year-old boy eagerly watched. He was appropriately dressed for the occasion with a shirt that read “I don’t always stop and look at trains…oh wait, yes I do.”
Perry, too, enjoyed trains starting at a young age. His said his mom would take him on the Amtrak from Boston to Florida for summer vacation. He recalled, “What got me really into trains is those trips with my mom. To see the scenery out the window and be able to get up and walk around. As a kid I really enjoyed it. And that really stuck with me.”
Amtrak plans to phase out the older Acela within the next year or two and launch 23 more trains within the NextGen cohort.
At Union Station on Thursday.