AS EARLY PLANS for the 2026 FIFA World Cup came together, the three host areas in the Northeast -- Boston, New York/New Jersey and Philadelphia -- saw an opportunity to pitch themselves as one megasite for visitors. A key piece of that pitch was how easy it is to get anywhere along the Northeast Corridor by Amtrak.
There's one potential problem with the plan, however: Amtrak. With the men's World Cup starting in June 2026, experts warn that the national rail system, already beleaguered by breakdowns and spotty service along the congested corridor, may not be up to the task.
"You're going to add millions of people into that mix for a short period of time, and it's really going to crush capacity," said Jim Mathews, president and CEO of the Rail Passengers Association, a nonprofit organization that advocates for rail use.
Passengers have long complained about occasional overcrowding, slow trains and major delays along the Northeast Corridor, an electrified 457-mile mainline stretch and commuter rail system from Boston to Washington, D.C. It is the busiest rail system in the United States, with about 2,200 daily trains carrying about 750,000 passengers on some part of the corridor each day. Its footprint includes 17 tunnels and 1,186 bridges, some of which are more than 100 years old. Amtrak manages most of the corridor, provides power and is responsible for facilities and infrastructure maintenance.
Even Amtrak acknowledges the challenges. Its 2024 company profile report described how demand is increasing in the Northeast Corridor, but "we saw reliability decrease, with almost 10 percent trains late, annulled, or terminated."
Well-publicized service disruptions in the corridor occurred in May and June 2024, when key equipment failed in the heat. In December, signal power issues led to delays in and out of New York's Penn Station, and two high-speed Acela trains were canceled between Washington, D.C., and Boston. Last Thursday, a downed power line caused an outage that halted Amtrak and Metro-North train service between New York and New Haven, Connecticut, stranding some riders and forcing others to find alternate transportation.
"They've done a lot of repairs, and I'm being told that this summer should be better than last summer was. And I hope that's true," Mathews said. "But no one will tell you that it is 100% fixed and everything is fine, because it's not."
FIFA estimates 6.5 million people will attend the World Cup in the United States, Mexico and Canada. Qualifying is under way for the field, which has been expanded from 32 to 48 teams. In the U.S., three Northeastern stadiums will play host to 21 games over five weeks, including the final in New Jersey on July 19.
Asked about concerns for the World Cup, Amtrak senior public relations manager Jason Abrams said: "Amtrak has provided transportation for major public events such as the Super Bowl, national political conventions and large-scale concerts. We are leveraging this experience managing high passenger volumes and upholding safety, reliability, and customer service standards into the mobility plans of host cities."
THE U.S. TRAVEL ASSOCIATION estimates an 8.8% increase in international visitors to the United States in 2025, and an increase of 8.9% in 2026. Local World Cup organizers say they are confident Amtrak will be able to handle the surge in visitors, and they recognize how important the service will be to many fans' experiences.
"I look at Amtrak as a huge partner of ours and a vital component," said Alex Lasry, CEO of the New York/New Jersey host committee. Besides traveling to games and fan events, he said, organizers expect visitors to travel to Washington, D.C., and Baltimore as tourists. He said Amtrak will be "incredibly important" to visitors from Europe, Asia, Central America and South America, where train travel is more expansive, more reliable and less expensive.
"The scale, the scope for this stuff is so big that it's one of those unparalleled [events]," Lasry said.
Meg Kane, CEO of the Philadelphia host committee, said her group is focused on creating safe and efficient travel for visitors and residents.
"Amtrak is at the heart of the Northeast Corridor's transportation ecosystem and has served as a strong, reliable partner during previous mega-events," Kane said. "Addressing potential transportation concerns and bottlenecks is a top priority for Philadelphia Soccer 2026, and we continue to work with federal and state agencies as well as regional partners to ensure our city delivers a world-class experience for all attendees."
Mike Loynd, CEO of FIFA World Cup Boston 2026, said providing transportation for thousands of international visitors for seven World Cup matches in the Boston area will require an "unprecedented level of service" from transportation partners. Boston matches are to be played in Foxborough at Gillette Stadium -- temporarily known as Boston Stadium -- which is about 29 miles southwest of Boston and served by the MBTA, a commuter rail line, rather than Amtrak.
"They're not going to be looking to rent a car necessarily and go to games," said Mitch Warren, executive director of the Northeast Corridor Commission, a regional group that includes representation from Amtrak, the U.S. Department of Transportation and Northeast Corridor states.
Mathews and others said the United States' failure to modernize rail travel will be more than a potential inconvenience to World Cup visitors next year. More crowds will be coming to the United States for the 2028 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles, the men's Rugby World Cup in 2031, the women's Rugby World Cup in 2033 and the 2034 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City.
"This would have been a showpiece event, among many, in what is seen as a decade of mega-events attracting visitors to the United States," Matthews said. "And because we have not made the investments that we needed to make, and because we are pulling back on the investments that we just started to make, we're wasting an opportunity to show the world that we can be a modern transportation country."
Even if the full $22 billion budgeted for Amtrak under the Biden Administration's 2021 Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act is delivered on schedule, most of the projects won't be completed for several years, long after World Cup fans have left the area. Expansion of a key "choke point" in the Northeast Corridor, for example, isn't expected to be completed until 2038.
Rail advocates said the issue isn't with either the Biden or current Trump administrations, it's with decades of congressional underfunding that has left a 100-year-old system struggling to meet even minimal demand. Amtrak set ridership records last year and expects to surpass them again this year, so even in the best of circumstances the system has almost no margin for error. Another unknown is how the Trump Administration, which has yet to name a permanent CEO for Amtrak, will handle allocating Amtrak funds as it slashes federal spending.
Yonah Freemark, who leads fair housing, land use and transportation studies for the think tank Urban Institute, said Amtrak's fundamental limitation is equipment.
"The service has been able to get back to pre-pandemic records in terms of ridership," Freemark said, "but at this point, it's very common to have trains that are fully at capacity every day on Amtrak in the Northeast Corridor."
When it comes to accommodating World Cup crowds, Freemark said the only solution is to run more and/or longer trains, which could be addressed by a new fleet of high-speed Acela trains Amtrak plans to bring into service starting this month.
"Those trains have more seats on them than the current trains, so that's going to be quite beneficial," Freemark said.
ACCORDING TO AMTRAK, there will be 37% more seats per train on the "NextGen" Acelas than there are on current "FirstGen" Acela trains. Amtrak has had as many as 20 Acela trains and plans to increase the fleet to 28, as part of a $2.45 billion investment to modernize train service in the Northeast Corridor. Amtrak officials said they could not say how many Acela trains will be in service in time for the World Cup.
Fares for faster Acela trains are significantly higher than for the standard Northeast Regional trains, and sometimes are as much or more than air travel.
John Robert Smith, chair of Transportation for America and former Amtrak board member (1998-2003) and chair (2001-2003), said there's "no secret of the infrastructure need" for the corridor, and that Congress will have difficult choices as it authorizes and appropriates funds for the upcoming year.
"This should be one of those issues that they take very seriously in making sure that the cities served have the opportunity for additional visitors in a seamless way," Smith said. "Amtrak, in this particular instance, actually can provide very readily with the appropriate funding."
Smith cited delays and cancellations last summer because of the condition of the catenary -- the curve formed by the wire supporting the trains from above. In the summer heat, metal wires in catenary systems expand, leading to sagging wires that can become tangled with the pantograph, which draws electricity to the train, according to NJTransit.com. Smith noted that the World Cup matches are scheduled from June to July, the latter half among some of the traditionally hotter days in the Northeast.
Amtrak announced that it plans to address the issues this summer with more strategically timed inspections and helicopter inspections of the catenary and other electric signal systems.
"Since June 2024, Amtrak completed roughly 9,500 additional hardware replacements," said Abrams, the Amtrak spokesman, "and is continuing to make short-term and long-term upgrades to our infrastructure."
"Some people are saying, 'I just want to attend a World Cup game,'" said Mike Blankemeyer, travel director for fan group Sons of Ben in Philadelphia. "And then some people are like, 'I'm not planning anything.' ... If the draw hasn't even happened yet, they could be stuck seeing a game they don't care for."
The New York/New Jersey host committee has regular meetings with Amtrak and other transportation officials and plans to run simulations to prepare for potential service or security problems during the Cup.
Asked what concerns he has about Amtrak service, Lasry said: "I don't know if I'd say I have any concerns, but I think it's just continuing to work with everyone on ensuring that we all are wide-eyed about what's coming here and about the expectations we have, the expectations that fans have, and let's not forget our local population, right? They still need to get around. They still need to be able to get to work and not be inconvenienced. I think it's kind of having a global plan, and that's why it's nice that we have [a year] to plan."
As a longtime Amtrak user himself -- Lasry is a native New Yorker who attended the University of Pennsylvania -- he said any issues should be manageable.
"At the end of the day, it's not a complicated thing, right? We run trains every day and we deal with people needing to get on and off every day. So we're now dealing with this just expanded service and more people," he said. "I'm aware where things tend to go wrong is just because of the lack of communication."
Lasry is confident it will work out, that Amtrak will be able to get the job done when an influx of riders hits the Northeast a year from now.
"There's no other option, right?" he said.
This story was reported and written by ESPN's T.J. Quinn, Anthony Olivieri and Maria Lawson.