People flew 800 million miles domestically in 2024, a 3.5% enhance from the 12 months prior, based on the Bureau of Transportation Statistics. Information from the Airways Reporting Company totaled airline ticket gross sales at $8.1 billion final month. And lobbying group Airways for America has introduced that home carriers have invested over $21 billion since 2022, shopping for new planes and including extra flights to satisfy demand.
Properly, this simply in: A latest Savanta ComRes survey discovered that 54% of People, if given the selection, would truly quite take a prepare.
Stunned? Amtrak shouldn’t be. The nation’s long-distance passenger railroad is properly conscious of the inherent benefits of prepare journey, together with house to stretch one’s legs and stations within the coronary heart of downtown. Throughout the pandemic, it promoted its non-public compartments as Covid-avoidance zones.
Now, Amtrak is making its newest pitch for selecting rail over runway. On Aug. 28, the Acela—Amtrak’s high-speed prepare that plies the 457 miles of observe between Washington, D.C. and Boston—will put its NextGen tools into income service: 28 high-tech, aerodynamic trains modeled off the TGV trains in France.
The brand new tools provides Amtrak so much to crow about. It additionally appears to be fueling a punchier perspective within the railroad’s advertising and marketing, a swagger first on view final October when its “Retrain for Journey” marketing campaign invited vacationers to “keep away from the stress of flying.” Whereas Amtrak has lengthy positioned its authentic Acela trains, launched in 2000, as a viable various to the aircraft, the perk-filled NextGen tools now makes the rail expertise—by Amtrak’s estimation—superior to it.
“As we introduce our new prepare units,” EVP and chief industrial officer Eliot Hamlisch instructed ADWEEK, “we needed to ensure that we took the great [aspects of the train] and amplified them in all of the methods we may.”
For instance, whereas planes provide fundamental WiFi, Acela’s NextGen vehicles have 5G WiFi. Airways serve meals from a cart; the brand new trains have a restaurant automobile with a full menu and grab-and-go choices. NextGen’s redesigned seats—with winged headrests for added privateness—appear to be straightforward chairs in comparison with the common seating at 30,000 toes.
The railroad’s pluck finest comes throughout in Hamlisch’s video tour of the brand new prepare, the place he playfully—and all too purposefully—takes the airways to job.
“You could possibly match three airplane restrooms in right here!” Hamlisch says, standing within the Acela’s capacious restroom. “Listed here are the center seats,” he intones, whereas seated within the aisle seat, earlier than interrupting himself: “Oh wait, that’s proper—there aren’t any!”
Additionally serving to to announce the NextGen trains is the notable slogan “Inbuilt America, for America.” Amtrak has acknowledged publicly that it employed union labor to construct its new trains in upstate New York, utilizing components from 180 suppliers in 29 states and, within the course of, created some 15,000 jobs.
Whereas Acela trains serve solely a slender slice of the nation, Amtrak is clearly directing this messaging at an even bigger viewers, fastidiously calibrating it to the nationwide vibe. A survey final 12 months by the Chicago Council on International Affairs discovered that 66% of People favored the restriction of imported items if it might safeguard American jobs. Home employment is a type of uncommon points with widespread bipartisan assist, and that’s not a nasty factor to have: Amtrak obtained some $2.4 billion in federal appropriations in 2024.
“In a world the place there’s quite a lot of goodness to focus on in regards to the prepare,” Hamlisch mentioned, “the truth that it’s produced right here within the U.S. we felt was one thing of paramount significance.”
And relevance. “Amtrak is studying the room, studying the nationwide temper,” noticed advertising and marketing marketing consultant David J. Deal. “Persons are insecure about their jobs. They’re insecure in regards to the state of the economic system generally. For a enterprise to say they imagine in America and in addition creating 15,000 U.S. jobs could be very credible.”
Even so, in Deal’s view, the railroad was smart to flaunt its new facilities first.
“Nobody’s going to journey on Amtrak as a result of they need a prepare that was inbuilt America,” he mentioned. “But it surely has to assist their model to make use of America as a supporting message.”
One problem that the NextGen Acela trains nonetheless can’t surmount are the constraints imposed by varied sections of the Northeast Hall tracks, the place grade crossings and a 152-year-old stone tunnel in Baltimore power trains to sluggish means down. However only for the report, Hamlisch mentioned, “our previous prepare units went 150 miles an hour. Our new prepare units go 160.”
