By Stewart Mader, For The Philadelphia Inquirer; December 14, 2020
President-elect Joe Biden has an answer for our most pressing problems, and it’s waiting for him at the station. When Biden and his running mate, Sen. Kamala Harris, won the 2020 election, Darryl Young of the Summit Foundation tweeted an image of Amtrak’s brand new Acela train, photoshopped to include the presidential seal, and captioned it “There ought to be an Amtrak One.”
Biden could send a powerful message by switching from Air Force One to Amtrak One for presidential travel between cities a few hundred miles apart. That’s the so-called “sweet spot” where rail travel is more convenient and environmentally sound than driving or flying. Axios reports the president-elect and his transition team are already considering traveling by train to the inauguration on Jan. 20, 2021, “ditching the typical flourish of arriving in Washington on an Air Force plane, pulling in instead on the same Amtrak train he rode to and from Delaware for 30 years as a senator.”