Do we still need to worry about Amtrak building a new high-speed rail line through Charlestown farmland?

Is the Charlestown Choo-choo crisis over?

By Will Collette

Since 2017, Charlestown has gone through periods of mass hysteria driven by Charlestown Planning Commissar Ruth Platner and fearmongering by the Charlestown Citizens Alliance (CCA). This hysteria has been over the then implausible and now dead proposal by the Federal Rail Administration (FRA) to build a new set of tracks in southern New England to allow Amtrak’s Acela trains to operate at full speed between New York and Boston.

The part of the FRA plan that so concerned Charlestown was called the “Old Saybrook-Kenyon Bypass and was part of a much larger and sadly overdue modernization of rail lines in the heavily travelled Northeast Corridor.

When the plan surfaced, the CCA swung into action, largely because they had ignored documents sent to the town from the FRA and were embarrassed that they were, as the cliché goes, asleep at the switch. As former CCA and Charlestown Town Council President Tom Gentz put it, “Who’s got time to read this stuff?”

Connecticut and Rhode Island communities mobilized and in short order, the FRA caved in, issuing a 2017 legally binding Record of Decision ruling out the Old Saybrook-Kenyon Bypass while calling for more planning. I believe even they realized the Bypass was a bad idea, plus they knew the project wasn’t going to happen anyway.

Within a month of his 2017 inauguration, Donald Trump proposed cutting Amtrak’s budget by 13%, centered mostly on halting new construction and long-distance subsidies. In 2017, conservative Republicans controlled both houses of Congress and they weren’t keen on Amtrak either.

Without funding or political support, no rail project benefiting the blue states of the Northeast Corridor was going forward. The Old Saybrook-Kenyon Bypass was dead on arrival.

It only goes down hill and, of course, it burns coal
(Chris Morris) 

Don’t get me wrong: I thought the Kenyon Bypass was a bad idea and, in an abundance of caution, some organizing was feasible. But I predicted the only way Trump and the Republican-controlled Congress would move the Northeast Corridor work forward was if Trump (or his kids) ended up owning Amtrak.

Even though the Kenyon Bypass died a quick and predictable death, that didn’t stop Ruth Platner from trying to raise the alarm as if the Bypass plan was going to rise from its grave. On three separate occasions – in 2021, 2022 and 2024 – Platner tried to get Charlestown’s residents to freak out like they did in 2017.

With absolutely no evidence, Ruth proclaimed  "They're Back?" And so it has gone for the past eight years. CLICK HERE for a detailing of Platner’s efforts to fire up the town over the bogus Charlestown Choo-choo crisis.

Fast forward to today

So here we are in 2025. King Donald Trump is back, newly crowned along with a die-hard MAGA Congress willing to do his bidding. The new feature is the emergence of South African Nazi Elon Musk as our de facto President.

So how does this affect Charlestown and the zombie Charlestown Choo-Choo?

Amtrak will be lucky to survive this Trump term without being sold off in whole or in part or being shut down.

AI art by Antonio Mavinga

Trump hates trains. Even though he claims he rode the New York subway in his youth – he called it “The Tunnel to Hell” - he just doesn’t like them. Here’s how he described his train experience in an interview with NY Times reporter Maggie Haberman:

“TRUMP: It’s been a long time. It’s been a long time. It has been. I know the subway system very well. I used to take it to Kew-Forest School, in Forest Hills, when I lived in Queens. And I’d take the subway to school. Seems a long time ago —"

In his first term, he proposed zeroing out federal funding for the New York subway system. His animosity toward trains is heightened by his predecessor Joe Biden’s unbridled love of trains. If Joe likes it, Donald hates it, pure and simple.

As Trains.com put it:

“Trump, meanwhile, has a vindictive streak a mile wide. And he clearly wants to erase anything that has predecessor Joe Biden’s fingerprints on it. Amtrak Joe’s signature achievement was the infrastructure law that sent billions Amtrak’s way for new equipment, route expansion, and Northeast Corridor improvement projects.”

Trump also doesn’t like high speed rail and has been actively trying to pull all $4 billion in federal funding from California’s high-speed rail project. Trump said that California doesn’t need a high-speed rail connection because, Trump claims, you can fly from San Francisco to Los Angeles for only $2. Yes, that’s two dollars.

He said:

“We’re gonna start a big investigation on that because it’s– I’ve never seen anything like it,” he said. “Nobody’s ever seen anything like it. Nobody has ever seen anything like it. The worst overruns that there have ever been in the history of our country. And it wasn’t even necessary. I would have said, you don’t buy it. You take an airplane – it costs you $2. It costs you nothing. You take an airplane. But this got started. And if you have to, you drive, you can drive.”

As we know, King Donald has a hard time following the plot, in this case, Amtrak’s goal to give travelers an alternative to driving.

Trump and Musk are determined to either destroy or privatize federally-funded entities they don’t like (and that’s just about all of them), whether it’s the Post Service, NOAA or Amtrak.

A Pittsburgh-Post Gazette editorial summed up what we can expect in the near term:

“In Trump’s second term, with reality television personality Sean Duffy serving as U.S. Secretary of Transportation, Amtrak’s future feels less than secure. Feasibility studies to map new routes connecting Pittsburgh and Chicago via Columbus and Fort Wayne may never happen.”

Obviously, the same fate applies to the on-going feasibility study currently being undertaken to come up with options to improve Amtrak connections between New York and Boston, including a future alternative to the Kenyon Bypass.

On March 19, Amtrak CEO Stephen Gardner resigned under pressure from Musk-Trump to accommodate the administration’s plans for Amtrak’s future. According to President Musk, this is the future as reported by The Hill:

“I think logically we should privatize anything that can reasonably be privatized,” Musk said while speaking at the Morgan Stanley conference on March 5, according to Newsweek. “I think we should privatize the Post Office and Amtrak for example. … We should privatize everything we possibly can.”

Amtrak CEO Gardner may have ended his career by releasing a five-page rebuttal titled “Proposals to Privatize Amtrak.” In that white paper, Amtrak listed its achievements and profitability. It also cited Great Britain's discovery that privatizing rail was not such a great idea:

“Proponents of privatization assert that it would produce better service at a lower cost and reduce or even eliminate the need for public funding…Great Britain’s recent renationalization of its rail service after three disastrous decades of privatization, and past unsuccessful efforts to privatize various Amtrak operations, show otherwise.”

It's also worth remembering that Amtrak came into being in 1971 because America's private rail companies collapsed, starting with the New Haven Railroad's bankruptcy in 1961. However, when logic and facts don’t matter, how can Amtrak resist Elon Musk’s chainsaw?

Since Platner’s first revival of the Charlestown Choo-Choo Crisis, Town Council Deb Carney has diligently stayed in regular contact with the RI Transportation Department to watch out for Charlestown’s interests in Amtrak’s planning process. Nothing has arisen to raise any alarm.

Recently, Council President Carney, Town Administrator Jeff Allen and stakeholder Kim Coulter met with RIDOT to discuss a planned stakeholder meeting on the latest in the New Haven-Providence Amtrak study. Charlestown has been offered a place at the table. 

Deb Carney says no date for this meeting has been set. Given the turmoil, lack of funding and Musk's crusade to dump Amtrak, there's a good chance that meeting will never take place.

So, is it time to call an end to the Crisis? Based on all the above, I’d say yes. Except…

A far-fetched but plausible scenario

Both Donald Trump and Elon Musk are major fanboys of Russian despot Vladimir Putin. Putin’s route to absolute power began when he allowed Russian oligarchs to buy up Russian state assets for kopeks on the ruble after the break-up of the Soviet Union. To use Musk’s words, Russia privatized anything that can reasonably be privatized

These oligarchs made Putin a very rich and powerful man, at the expense of Russian citizens. As Trump and Musk start selling off US assets such as Amtrak, the Postal Service, et al., watch how they use the Russian model to offer fire sale prices to American oligarchs in return for kickbacks.

Privatizing Amtrak will mean some oligarch will get to buy it for cheap. They may have their own ideas about its future, but I’d expect them to maximize profits by modernizing the system. Plus, they will expect that the federal government to foot the bill.

Here’s how Trains.com summed it up:

Put all this together and the inevitable conclusion is that Amtrak as we know it will cease to exist. Long-distance trains will disappear. State-sponsored routes will continue in some form, so long as the states pick up the tab. And the Northeast Corridor will be raffled off to the highest private bidder.

I can easily see Elon Musk as Amtrak’s highest bidder followed by some flamboyant scheme to recreate the system as TrainX. As in all Musk’s venture, he will use other people’s money, no doubt expecting massive amounts of federal funding to turn his TrainX into a space-age system, perhaps using mag-lev technology. 

Note: there already is a TrainX, a private fitness center in California, but I'm sure Musk could convince them to sell their trademark. There is also a start-up maglev train company hoping to operate along the Northeast Corridor called Northeast Maglev.

Mag-Lev (magnetic levitation) is a technology that has been on the cusp of commercial viability for quite some time – high-speed monorails riding on waves of electromagnetic energy. China and Japan are already well on their way to building inter-city mag-lev lines where trains can run at up to 300 miles per hour.

The US is already funding Musk to build exploding SpaceX rockets and Tesla cars and trucks that crash and burn, making Elon Musk one of the biggest recipients of federal corporate welfare. If Musk “buys” Amtrak, he would expect the taxpayers to pay for him to pursue his dreams.

If Musk or some other oligarch buys Amtrak and try out some scheme to boost profits, they’re most likely to do it along the profitable Northeast Corridor. Any improvements they make will involve major construction. For instance, a mag-lev line would involve extensive new construction that would cause major environmental effects.

But Musk and Trump are wiping out environmental regulations that protect land, drinking water, farms, wildlife or human health and decimating the staffs at EPA and Interior that enforce such rules.

They won’t care if they destroy historic Charlestown farms, vital watersheds, forest land or wildlife habitats. 

For now, these are my theories about what might happen when Musk’s proposal to privatize Amtrak happens. I can only speculate about what a future Amtrak owner will actually do.

So now what?

In this article, I lay out what we know – Trump, Musk and Congress will not approve or fund Amtrak’s Northeast Corridor plans – what is reasonable to expect – Amtrak is likely going to go on the chopping block – and what we can reasonably guess. Unless something changes in Washington politics, Amtrak will be sold or closed. Some oligarch will be able to buy it for cheap.

The Trump Administration will almost certainly offer a new buyer generous financial incentives and clear away any environmental obstacles to whatever plans a new buyer might have for the system. The new buyer will, of course, be expected to give Trump a large back-hander.

But for now, the Northeast Corridor plan is dead.

For the past eight years, parts of northern Charlestown have been at DefCon 1, thanks to alarmist and unsubstantiated rhetoric from Ruth Platner and the CCA. Knowing what we know, we can reduce the alert level to Defcon 4 on the Charlestown Choo-Choo. We should pay attention to what happens to Amtrak but with a lot less anxiety.

In other words, no more Ruth Platner Charlestown Choo-Choo false alarms.