I ride the North East Corridor rails often and have clocked the Acela at 130 MPH via GPS going into Boston, and the Northeast Regional hits 115 MPH in spots from Eastern CT to NYC.
The route is just too winding for those speeds in so many places and you end up going 60MPH for much of the trip.
The best views going north are past the Connecticut river, rolling through Niantic, to New London and the small coastal villages like Mystic, and heading south the rail bridge that runs next to the Triborough gives you a fantastic panorama of Manhattan's east side.
I've clocked Acela at just below 150mph on my GPS in between Providence and Boston. As I understand it, they would like to go faster in other sections, but the track / catenary isn't able to sustain that speed on most of the journey. Still way better than flying for BOS<->NYC or NYC<->WAS. It's a shame that the ticket prices are 2x what the regional is though.
Never heard about having dedicated rails. It would be nice, since the FRC requires any train that travels on track shared by freight to be basically built like a tank, which makes them much more expensive to make an operate.
> and heading south the rail bridge that runs next to the Triborough gives you a fantastic panorama of Manhattan's east side.
For anyone else interested, that's the Hell Gate Bridge[0]. It's odd, I'm in the generation that will always think of the Triborough as the Triborough, not the RFK, the same way others still think Interboro, not Jackie Robinson.
The route is just too winding for those speeds in so many places and you end up going 60MPH for much of the trip.
The best views going north are past the Connecticut river, rolling through Niantic, to New London and the small coastal villages like Mystic, and heading south the rail bridge that runs next to the Triborough gives you a fantastic panorama of Manhattan's east side.
I love the train.