Zippy Amtrak Train Gets Tangled in ‘the Swamp’

By ALEXANDER BURNS OCT. 2, 2017



An Amtrak Acela train crosses Hell Gate Bridge in New York. The train is a preferred means of transportation for Northeastern elites. Credit Luke Sharrett for The New York Times

Sebastian Gorka’s voice rippled with contempt as he announced, on behalf of Donald J. Trump, that the old Washington establishment was obsolete. Declaring it was time for “new ideas,” Mr. Gorka, then a White House aide, packed disdain into a cryptic phrase that could have been borrowed from science fiction — a space-age update on the Bolsheviks’ “dustbin of history.”

“We’re not going to stay in the Washington bubble,” Mr. Gorka proclaimed on television, “or the Acela corridor of wonkery.” ... With its Asimovian name, wielded these days as a vaguely derisive epithet, the Acela might sound to an untrained ear like something exotic, even menacing. The reality is far more pedestrian: The Acela is a train.

In the most literal sense, it is Amtrak’s version of luxury rail, traversing a line between Boston and Washington. The Amtrak website boasts of “speeds up to 150 mph,” a figure worth boasting about in a region plagued by dysfunctional railways, though sluggish compared with its European and Asian cousins.

At the moment, the train is famous less for moving passengers than for sorting them into a cultural set. Not since the Concorde’s last flight in 2003 has a means of transportation given the language such an evocative code word for a way of life — the flitting between cities of Northeastern elites, whose values and habits are said to have been repudiated in the last election.
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Lizzie O’Leary, the New York-based host of the public radio show “Marketplace Weekend” and a frequent Acela rider, shrugs off all the recent train-shaming. Ms. O’Leary, who relies on the Acela to visit her family in Washington, has become an Emily Post-like figure in the Amtrak community. ... She has a voluble Twitter account that deals extensively with the etiquette of the quiet car, a supposedly placid zone adjacent to the first-class compartment, where cellphone conversations are banned.