Amtrak celebrates groundbreaking of new heavy maintenance facility at Penn Coach Yard

Amtrak has begun work on its new heavy maintenance facility at Penn Coach Yard in Philadelphia. Amtrak CEO Stephen Gardner celebrated the groundbreaking with Federal Railroad Administrator Amit Bose, White House Deputy Assistant to the President for Infrastructure Implementation Samantha Silverberg and Rail Passengers Association President and CEO Jim Mathews. 

“This new maintenance facility is critical to upgrading the customer experience with new state-of-the-art trains, combined with our other major infrastructure projects,” Gardner said. “This project and several others like it will help drive continued ridership growth and future service expansion thanks to funding from the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and continued support from the Biden-Harris Administration, Congress and many other partners around the country.” 

The $462-million project is funded entirely by the Biden-Harris Administration’s Bipartisan Infrastructure Law. This new facility will service many of Amtrak’s Acela, Northeast Regional, Keystone Service and Pennsylvanian trains that operate up and down the Northeast Corridor (NEC), which today provides more than 12 million annual Amtrak trips and continues to grow. 

When it opens in 2027, the new heavy maintenance facility will improve the customer and employee experience by speeding up train maintenance and reducing turnaround times with more modern maintenance practices. The new facility will be used for daily inspections, service and cleaning, along with life cycle maintenance and heavy maintenance repairs. These upgrades will enable more reliable and frequent service across Pennsylvania and the NEC, America’s busiest passenger railroad. 

“Upgrades at Amtrak’s Penn Coach Yard near Philadelphia’s Gray 30th Street Station will drastically improve train maintenance, reduce train turnaround times and more, resulting in more reliable and frequent passenger rail service for people in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania and riders up and down the Northeast Corridor,” Bose said. 

Earlier this spring, Amtrak awarded a design-build construction contract for the new maintenance facility. Construction will take place within the existing rail yard footprint in two phases and require relocating existing functions currently spread around Penn Coach Yard into one consolidated multifunctional facility. 

The new heavy maintenance facility will encompass nearly 350,000-square feet within the existing rail yard footprint, featuring a two-bay Maintenance and Inspection (M&I) facility with inspection pits, a drop table and fueling pads at each end, as well as two adjacent Service and Cleaning (S&C) tracks. 

Additional upgrades include a new direct fixation track within the M&I and S&C areas; removal of existing and installation of new catenary structures; new retaining walls and storage buildings; utility relocations and more. No major customer impacts are expected as a result of this project.