High-speed route
Acela
Boston → Washington, D.C. · United States
Acela in pictures
Photographs by their authors, hosted on Wikimedia Commons · tap through for the licence
- Distance
- 735 km
- Fastest time
- 6 h 42 min
- Average speed
- 110 km/h
- Top speed
- 257 km/h
- Operator
- Amtrak
- Train
- Avelia Liberty
- Countries
- United States
- In service since
- 2000
- Runs
- roughly hourly weekdays; reduced weekends
- Riders per year
- ≈ 3.5M
Figures are published values, not live data · corrections log
America’s fastest train works the dense Northeast Corridor: 240 km/h bursts between five major downtowns.
The Avelia Liberty sets, in service since August 2025, tilt through the curves of a corridor first engineered in the nineteenth century: which is precisely the Acela’s charm and its constraint. Its fastest running comes along the New England shore, where the train outruns beach traffic within sight of Long Island Sound. It is less a train ride than a rolling boardroom, the only true high-speed railroading in the Americas, linking the capitals of finance and government.
How this line was checked
- Line drawn from OpenStreetMap relation 4799100 — the same nodes OpenStreetMap holds for this railway, thinned to within 31 m of them
- Checked against OpenStreetMap: the whole line lies on real track, a median 8 m from it
- Checked against the running timetable via Transitous: our line sits under 100 m from the shape of 2151
- Wikipedia has an article for this line
Along the way
- Boston Back Bay start
- Providence and the Mystic shoreline
- Hell Gate Bridge into Manhattan
- 30th Street Station’s columned hall
- Susquehanna River crossing
- Capitol dome on arrival
More high-speed routes
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Scheduled at 310 km/h, Europe’s fastest timetable, this line flipped one of the world’s busiest air routes to rail.
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Spain’s first AVE, built for Expo ’92 in standard gauge, the line that reset Spanish railways.
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More train routes in United States.