Northeast Corridor trains travel along decaying rails

NEW YORK — The trains that link global centers of learning, finance and power on the East Coast lumber through tunnels dug just after the Civil War, and cross century-old bridges that sometimes jam when they swing open to let tugboats pass. Hundreds of miles of overhead wires that deliver power to locomotives were hung during the Great Depression.

The rails of the Northeast Corridor are decaying, increasingly strained — and moving more people than ever around the nation’s most densely populated region.

The railroad’s importance became all the more apparent after Amtrak Train 188 derailed Tuesday as it sped around a curve in Philadelphia, killing eight passengers and injuring more than 200.

The wreck closed part of the corridor all week. On a normal weekday, 2,000 trains run by Amtrak and eight other passenger rail systems carry 750,000 riders on railway between Washington and Boston, making it a vital link for both intercity travelers and suburban commuters.

Federal investigators will take months to determine the cause of the crash. Speed, not equipment failure, has emerged as a key factor.

But the crash refocused attention on the slowmotion deterioration of vital infrastructure with a seemingly endless to-do list. By one estimate, it would take $21 billion just to replace parts still in use beyond their intended lives.

“The stakes are enormous,” Amtrak’s president, Joseph Boardman, warned in his 2015 request to Congress for funding. He said the corridor was experiencing a “crisis brought on by decades of chronic underfunding.”

Some federal lawmakers want to give Amtrak less, not more. A day after the accident, the House Appropriations Committee voted to cut Amtrak’s federal subsidy for next year by $251 million, to $1.1 billion.

The number of Amtrak riders in the corridor is up 50 percent since 1998, thanks mostly to the introduction of high-speed trains now favored by travelers who used to fly between New York, Washington and Boston. Amtrak carried a record 11.6 million people on the routes in fiscal 2014.

Rebecca Reyes-Alicea of the Federal Railroad Administration ticks off a list of needs, from a bigger station in Boston at the northern terminus to fixing obsolete bridges along many of the 450 miles that end next to Capitol Hill. Half of the route’s 1,000 bridges are around a century old.

The journey between Boston and Washington takes at least seven hours. Trains connecting major cities in France can cover a longer distance in less than half the time.