Fittingly, the American passenger train was born on the Fourth of July. On that date in 1828, one of our Founding Fathers laid the granite cornerstone of the first chartered railroad in the United States, the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad.
AMTRAK: PAST, PRESENT, FUTURE
The two biggest players in the nation's pursuit of high-speed rail said Thursday they will work together to search for trains that will operate at up to 220 miles per hour along both U.S. coasts.
A federal partnership was unveiled Thursday involving the Departments of Homeland Security and Transportation, along with Amtrak, that will seek to combat human trafficking by training more than 8,000 front-line transportation employees and Amtrak police officers to identify trafficking victims and perpetrators and report suspected cases.
Amtrak's internal watchdog agency is criticizing the rail service's management for not doing enough to uncover drug and alcohol abuse among "safety sensitive" employees such as engineers and conductors.
One Amtrak employee spent much of his time in the office sending emails to women he met through a half-dozen online dating sites and claimed overtime pay for hours he spent officiating high school sporting events. Another worker may have received more than $100,000 in bogus overtime, records show.
Amtrak unveiled Wednesday a massive $7 billion plan to expand Union Station that has many tentative components -- including how to pay for it.
Amtrak left taxpayers stranded with a $1.4 billion bill last year, and it's going to cost even more to keep government-run rail alive this year. Instead of looking for ways to cut back to attain profitability or just improve the notoriously late, slow and underwhelming service, Amtrak's CEO proposed on Wednesday to buy a set of electric trains (not the toy kind) to make his request for another 130 mostly ordinary rail cars more politically correct.
An Amtrak train crashed into another train unloading passengers in an Oakland station, leaving 16 people with mainly minor injuries, authorities said.
