Amtrak raises prices on Northeast Corridor multi-ride tickets

Owen Sahnow, who works at the Delaware Theatre Company, wonders how he’ll commute in the future from Philadelphia to Wilmington now that Amtrak is raising the price of his monthly pass by nearly 70%.

He moved to Philadelphia last year for his partner’s work and has been taking a trolley from West Philly to 30th Street Station where he hops on an Amtrak train to Wilmington. He has been paying $324 a month for his Amtrak monthly pass and an additional $94 for a SEPTA pass, he said.

Next month, it will be a different story. Amtrak raised prices on all of its multi-ride tickets on the Northeast Corridor starting July 1. That includes monthly as well as 10-ride ticket passes.

“It’s typical for prices to change regularly across industries based on customer demand and economic trends,” Beth Toll, the company’s senior public relations manager, said via email Wednesday. “Amtrak customers have benefited from deep discounts on multi-ride tickets across the network for a number of years, and our recent pricing change reflects an update to better align pricing with current fares on the Northeast Corridor.”

Prices were not raised uniformly. A monthly pass between Philadelphia and Trenton used to cost $552 and now costs $825, a 49% increase. Commuters riding Amtrak between New York and Philadelphia used to pay $1,032 for their monthly pass and now will pay $1,250, a 21% increase. Travelers looking to get monthly passes between Washington and Wilmington will pay $1,250 now compared to $948 previously, a nearly 32% increase.

Despite the increases, Toll says monthly passes still offer customers a significant discount compared to single tickets.

For Sahnow, the new pricing model means over $200 more for his monthly pass.

“I don’t have that much wiggle room in my budget,” he said.

With the fare increases, commuters are weighing their options.

Sahnow will probably switch back to SEPTA Regional Rail, though Amtrak is faster, has more trains during commuting hours, and fewer delays than SEPTA, he said.

“The challenge now is, if I’m going to pay $94 a month for SEPTA and $550 a month for Amtrak … like at that point, I might as well own a new car, which I don’t really think I could afford right now, but maybe, maybe I could,” he said.

A 27-year-old law student and her fiancée said they moved to Wilmington because they commute in opposite directions each morning: She goes north to Philadelphia, and he heads south to Baltimore.

Since last December they’ve bought monthly Amtrak passes to make the trips. She paid $324 for Wilmington-Philadelphia. His pass cost $792 for the longer trip to Baltimore. But as of July 1, the passes to Philadelphia jumped to $550, a nearly 70% increase. The monthly price for Wilmington-Baltimore trips went up to $1,075, or nearly 36%.

The couple, who did not want to be quoted by name because of privacy concerns, were lucky in one respect: Having made their monthly purchase the night before the new fares took effect, they bought some time. As of Aug. 1, though, the law student will use SEPTA, and they’ll absorb the price shock on the Baltimore pass.

The new fares come as Amtrak has recently been experiencing more delays and breakdowns.

At least 10 times in the past two months, a failure of the electrical system that powers Amtrak and NJ Transit trains has frozen rail traffic in the nation’s densest region. When that happens, breakdowns ripple up and down the 427-mile Northeast Corridor, stranding travelers for hours at a time.

Amtrak inherited its catenary — the wires and poles that move power from generating stations to locomotives — from the Pennsylvania Railroad, which went bankrupt 54 years ago. The wires tend to droop in extreme heat and that can delay or even stop trains.

On June 20, for example, service was suspended for three hours along 150 miles of the corridor. Trains were stopped or canceled as far away from New York City as Harrisburg and Boston.

Officials at Amtrak have said the problems are due to delayed maintenance.

NJ Transit relies on Amtrak’s tracks, tunnels, and electric power system to carry an average of 130,000 passengers a day in and out of New York, according to the agency.

New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy called outages “an unmitigated disaster” in May in a scathing letter to Amtrak’s board chairman, demanding the railroad improve its aging infrastructure and put backup systems in place ASAP.

“I refuse to accept these Amtrak infrastructure challenges as an inevitable part of operating integrated mass transit systems,” Murphy said. “We can and must do better.”