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Amtrak Moves Slowly Toward an Acela Successor

Good morning. It’s Wednesday. We’ll look at how Amtrak is moving toward faster trains in the Northeast. We’ll also get details on a fourth murder charge in the Gilgo Beach serial killings on Long Island.

Credit…Hiroko Masuike/The New York Times

A new train for the heavily traveled Boston-to-Washington corridor has moved a step closer to going into service.

The train, a long-overdue replacement for Amtrak’s Acelas, sounded like the railroad equivalent of the law school student who just couldn’t pass the bar exam. Amtrak officials said the train finally passed computer modeling tests — required under Amtrak’s contract with the manufacturer — on the 14th try.

That result was what the Federal Railroad Administration had been waiting to hear before it authorized real-life tryouts on the tracks. Amtrak said that putting the new trains through their paces on the tracks was “the next step in the safety certification process.”

The new train can’t go faster than 160 miles per hour — 10 m.p.h. more than the Acelas — because of speed restrictions along the aging tracks in the Northeast Corridor. Modernizing the tracks to make faster speeds possible would be daunting, would cost more than $100 billion and would need to be accompanied by changes in the right-of-way regulations that limit speeds.

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