Acela carries (per Wikipedia's cited source) around 3.5M passengers per year. From Washington Dulles airport, approximately 265k passengers per year fly to Bos

Acela carries (per Wikipedia's cited source) around 3.5M passengers per year. From Washington Dulles airport, approximately 265k passengers per year fly to Boston. Another 715k fly DCA-BOS. DCA-LGA accounts for 318k. DCA-JFK, IAD-LGA and IAD-JFK do not crack top-ten lists of busiest domestic routes for their origins. To get a feel for just Acela (which is not the only Northeast Corridor train service), it's slightly less than the annual passenger volume by air SFO-LAX, SFO-JFK and SFO-BOS combined. The entire Northeast Corridor carries approximately 12M passengers per year. If it were operated by air, it would be the second-busiest route in the world by passenger volume, slotting between CJU-GMP in Korea (13M/year) and MEL-SYD in Australia (9M/year). In 2012, the New York Times reported that 75 percent of travelers between New York and Washington used one of Amtrak's Northeast Corridor trains (Acela isn't the only one), and between New York and Boston 54 percent used a train: https://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/16/business/hassles-of-air-travel-push-passengers-to-amtrak.html https://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/16/business/hassles-of-air-t... There certainly are things that could be improved. But Amtrak's operations in the northeast are not some hypothetical potential maybe-someday competitor to air travel. They are and for years have been a real and significant competitor to air travel. And for what it's worth, Amtrak also has a farebox recovery ratio for its entire nationwide network that hovers around 95%, second in the US only to BART Oakland Airport Connector (96%).