New Amtrak Train to Bring Easy NYC Travel to Queen City Residents

This summer, Burlington is set to have a convenient new way to get to New York City. The Ethan Allen Express railway will extend from Rutland, its current northernmost destination, through Middlebury and Vergennes, onto Burlington.

The train is on schedule to roll into Burlington’s Union Station in July 2022. A date can’t be set yet due to unpredictable weather patterns and spring thawing. “We can’t control Mother Nature,” said Dan Delabruere, Bureau Director of Rail and Aviation at the Vermont Agency of Transportation.

It takes 5 ½ hours to get from Rutland to New York City. The train ride from Burlington to New York is likely to take 8 hours, according to Delabruere.

*Burlington’s* *Union Station* *(credit:* *Beyond My Ken/Wikimedia Commons)*

Reconstruction & Renovation

Updates and renovations to the station and track in Burlington began about two years ago. According to Sun Community News, 31 bridges between Hoosick Junction, New York and Rutland have been rehabilitated or replaced. Currently, the Ethan Allen Express has twelve stops, running through the Hudson River Valley from New York City’s Penn Station.

Extensive updates had to be done on the train tracks in Vermont. In Burlington, a storage siding, a short piece of track used to house a stopped train, has to be installed in the yard off of Lavalley Lane, just south of Perkins Pier. The train will be stored overnight in the Vermont Rail Systems yard before it returns to New York City in the morning. There were shipping delays on switches for the train storage area, but they have been delivered and are being installed now, according to Delabruere.

Reconstruction of the train crossings at King Street and Maple Street are being finished this spring. As for the physical train station, the canopy has been repainted and will be reinstalled this spring. There will also be new lighting along the sidewalk area around the station.

In Pittsford, a siding project is being worked on to create an alternate route for freight trains in the area so that the Ethan Allen will not come into contact with freight activity in the area.

Investing in the Future

In July of 2021, Amtrak announced that they are investing $7.3 billion into upgrading their fleet. This equipment will be made by California company Siemens Mobility Inc, according to a CNBC report from July 2021. Trains for the Ethan Allen Express will be powered by a dual diesel/battery system that will be able to be charged in New York City on the third rail, according to an article from Vermont Biz.

In 2010, the Vermont congressional delegation requested that the Federal Transportation Department reallocate funding for high-speed rail to Vermont’s Western Corridor project, according to a press release by Senator Leahy’s office in December of that year. Quoted in the press release, Bernie Sanders argued that “while other states may not want to move aggressively toward a clean energy future with rail travel, Vermonters would be more than happy to take the lead in energy efficiency and higher-speed rail.”

In 2015, Vermont got $10 million in federal funding to upgrade the northernmost 11 miles of track between Rutland and Burlington. The funding comes from a Department of Transportation grant program.

According to Delabruere, Vermont spends about $8 million annually to operate the two Amtrak trains in the state: the Vermonter and the Ethan Allen Express.

Trains of the Past

Plans to bring the Ethan Allen Express to Burlington have been in the works for decades. For three months in 1999, a passenger train between Burlington and Rutland had a trial run but was ultimately discontinued due to low participation numbers and high operating costs. This train was called the Ethan Allen Connection and took 2 ½ hours, about an hour longer than it takes to drive from Burlington to Rutland. Developer Melinda Moulton of Main Street Landing renovated Union Station in the 1990s in hopes of enticing Amtrak to bring passenger rail back to Burlington, according to a VT Digger story in December of 2017.

When Delabruere took over as Bureau Director in 2011, the concept of extending the Ethan Allen Express was already well established. He thinks that the project has been in the works for at least twenty years.

Delabruere hopes that for “the amount of effort it’s taken, it is going to be well worth it.”

Easy access to the train will be beneficial for college students, according to the Vermont Transportation agency, especially as a large percent of the student population do not have cars.

Furthermore, Delabruere pointed out the obvious win for the climate.

“The amount of carbon used to move people by train is a lot less than by cars,” Delabruere said.