Dive Brief:
- The Amtrak Board of Directors agreed on July 30 to establish a committee focused on expanding the passenger railroad across the country.
- The committee will help guide development of new routes, additional train frequencies and strategic investments across the Amtrak network, according to a press release.
- The announcement comes as Amtrak explores a corporate restructuring that would create three groups under the parent company focused on service, fleet management and infrastructure.
Dive Insight:
Amtrak’s initiatives follow an increase in ridership during the first nine months of the 2026 fiscal year. The railroad carried 1.7 million more customers than in the same period last year, it said.
“Expanding passenger rail service is essential to meeting growing demand, strengthening mobility, and connecting more communities to economic opportunity,” Robert Gleason, Amtrak board member and chair of the system expansion committee, said in a statement. A Trump appointee, Gleason has served on the board since September 2025.
The other three committee members were nominated by former President Joe Biden. A designated U.S. Department of Transportation representative, who was not named, will also serve on the committee.
The committee’s priorities are to grow passenger rail service and frequencies, increase state-supported services, advance passenger corridor development, strengthen host railroad partnerships, keep infrastructure and trains in good condition and develop sustainable funding strategies, Amtrak said in a press release.
The plan to restructure Amtrak may be a more volatile issue. “Congress is unlikely to sit quietly in the cheap seats while somebody fundamentally reorganizes the company,” Rail Passengers Association President and CEO Jim Mathews said in a post on Substack.
He brought up issues around Amtrak’s statutory authority to restructure itself, how the new corporate entities would be governed, the cost of restructuring and how it would affect existing routes and jobs.
U.S. Reps. Rick Larsen, D-Wash., and Dina Titus, D-Nev. — both members of the House Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure — sent a July 27 letter to then-Amtrak President Roger Harris questioning whether Amtrak or the Federal Railroad Administration is driving the restructuring proposal. Larsen and Titus also questioned the purpose of the restructuring and asked how the plan would conform with statutory congressional funding mechanisms. Harris stepped down on July 31 as part of a planned transition.
Meanwhile, Amtrak appropriations will be cut by about 83% once its current funding expires on Sept. 30 and a stopgap measure goes into effect, according to the American Public Transportation Association. The stopgap measure gives Congress and the White House until Dec. 11 to reauthorize surface transportation funding.
“We’re heading toward midterm elections,” Mathews wrote. “The Congress that deals with Amtrak next year may look rather different from the Congress sitting in Washington today.”
Amtrak has asked for public comment on its restructuring proposal, with a deadline of Oct. 30.
