Amtrak this week launched work on a pair of eastern maintenance facilities, breaking ground on Wednesday (Nov. 5) for construction of a new facility at Washington’s Ivy City Yard and holding a similar event Thursday for Southampton Yard in South Boston.
In both cases, the work is tied to preparations for the new Airo trainsets, the semipermanently coupled equipment from Siemens that will replace the current individual-car trains used in Northeast Regional service. Those trains are expected to begin arriving in 2027.
At Ivy City, the $705 million project will include a new 860-foot-long structure of more than 55,000 square feet, as well as another 205,000 square feet of renovated space to include five maintenance and inspection tracks with inspection pits, drop tables, sanding systems, and fueling pads at each end, as well as four service and cleaning tracks, three of them covered. The project will open in phases through 2030.
“This investment will help transform the customer experience, improve reliability, and enable more efficient maintenance practices,” Amtrak president Roger Harris said in a press release. “We’re grateful for the strong support that has made this project possible, especially from our valued partners at the Federal Railroad Administration.”
Overall, Amtrak says the improvements will benefit Acela, long-distance, and commuter trains that use the Ivy City Yard, as well as the Airos for Northeast Regional service.
“The modernization of Amtrak’s Ivy City maintenance facility, and its role in the launch of our new Airo equipment will aid the Commonwealth in expanding and improving our Amtrak Virginia service for decades to come,” said DJ Stadtler, executive director of the Virginia Passenger Rail Authority. “With similar upgrades occurring at facilities in New York and Boston, this modernization project will benefit every passenger that boards Amtrak’s Airo from Virginia to Massachusetts.”
At Boston’s Southampton Yard, work will include construction of a new two-track maintenance and inspection facility, and renovation of the current two-track service and inspection facility into a new service and cleaning facility, a $583 million project funded by the FRA. That work will open in stages with completion by 2029.
Amtrak selected the contractors for both projects, as well as similar improvements at Sunnyside Yard in New York, earlier this year [see “Amtrak awards contracts …,” Trains.com, Aug. 20, 2025]. Similar improvements are already in progress in Seattle — where the Amtrak Cascades service will be the first to receive Airo equipment — and Philadelphia.
Somewhere in the photo – I believe at the very top – is the location where unattended Penn Central locomotives took a walk across the NB lanes of the Southeast Expressway in 1968. The road, which is now I-93, was totally rebuilt as the lower end of the “Big Dig”.
We had no problem driving home to the south suburbs that day. As the SB lanes were then partially elevated we had a good view of the locos sitting across the NB lanes. It’s likely that if the SB lanes weren’t stepped higher (at the time) the locos might have kept going.
At the time I was too young to know or to care, but I have to wonder how Mass DPW and the MDC police (both agencies since disbanded) cleaned up the mess.