UPDATED 8/19/25 11:59PM: For clarity.

The Trans-Commonwealth Railroad is a series on the challenges and efforts to connect the length of Massachusetts by rail.

Feel like crap. Just want her back. The Lake Shore Limited in Boston. (via Wikipedia)

A huge hole has opened up under East-West rail. Thankfully, it is only a literal one.

Out west near Rensselaer, a sinkhole has prompted the suspension of rail service to points east of Albany. That means the Berkshire Flyer, a seasonal train between Pittsfield and New York City, and the Boston to Albany leg of the Lake Shore Limited have been bustituted until at least late Fall.

By all accounts, Amtrak, which owns the affected portion of track, moved quickly to address the issue. The hole appeared in an isolated area in East Greenbush, New York, which seemingly complicated repairs. Yet, with no interim service planned between Springfield and Boston, the situation underscores the slow progress to realize state plans to establish additional service between east and west.

The problem began when Amtrak noticed the tracks shifting in May. At first it did not seem alarming, but conditions deteriorated. Amtrak switched the two affected trains over to buses, perhaps as early as late June.

WNYT, an NBC affiliate serving the Albany area, first reported the cause of the suspension. When the station first ran its story in July, it said service may not return until January.

Amtrak did not answer questions about interim service, but it did refer WMP&I to a service advisory that said rail service would not be restored before November. The advisory states the railroad expects to reassess the situation by summer’s end and provide updates.

The loss of the Berkshire Flyer—as a train anyway—is no doubt a disappointment for Pittsfield and the region. The Berks had long sought a one-seat ride rail connection to Manhattan. Plans via Connecticut proved difficult. Instead, Berkshire County scored a win with a weekend schedule via Albany and the Empire Corridor. With both it and the Lake Shore Limited, which also stopped in Pittsfield, suspended, the city has no rail service right now.

The Berkshire Flyer is a state-supported service. When Compass Rail—the formal name for the project that encompasses East-West rail—begins, it will be a state-Amtrak partnership.

The Lake Shore Limited, by contrast, operates as part of Amtrak’s long-distance network. The Boston leg normally meets the New York one in Albany. The two legs become one train there and then travels westward to Chicago. In other words, what is normally Massachusetts’s only truly trans-commonwealth rail service linking east and west operates without any formal input from the state.

As the CSX-owned Berkshire Division (BK) leaves Western Mass and enters New York, Amtrak’s Post Road Branch (PRB) splits off. It is the orange line on the right going into Albany. The sink hole is along here in East Greenbush. (via OpenRailwayMap.com)

The Massachusetts Department of Transportation has confirmed it has been in touch with Amtrak about the suspension. However, it referred questions about the restoration of service and discussions about an interim service between Boston and Springfield to Amtrak.

Consistent with its arm’s length relationship with the current Boston to Albany service, MassDOT did not say directly whether it supported an interim rail service connecting Boston and Springfield.

“MassDOT is supportive of Amtrak’s operational needs and will continue to be in communication with Amtrak regarding passenger rail schedules,” the agency said in a statement.

New York state’s Transportation Department said it was not involved in either of the suspended trains. It referred questions about the sinkhole’s impact to Amtrak.

Were the suspension shorter, an interim Boston-Springfield service might be more trouble than it is worth. However, more than half of 2025 could go by without any rail connection linking the three largest cities in Massachusetts. It should be possible to run a train in the Lake Shore Limited’s place, either terminating in Springfield, where Amtrak has facilities to turn around trains, or turning south to New Haven as the first Compass Rail trains may do.

The alternatives are fewer further west. Freight railroad CSX owns the old Boston & Albany track through Massachusetts west of Worcester. Going west, Amtrak leaves CSX and turns onto the Post Road Branch, a stretch of track Amtrak owns, outside Albany. The sinkhole is under this track.

According to OpenRailwayMap, either the Berkshire Flyer or the Lake Shore Limited would need to make time-consuming backup moves to use CSX’s track (the Berkshire Division) to get to Penn Station in New York or Albany’s station (which is located across the Hudson River in Rensselaer).

Springfield Union Station: Why not us? (WMP&I)

It is not clear what other operational constraints might prohibit interim service. Amtrak data does not show how many passengers who board at Springfield Union Station travel to points east. Similarly, data for the Lake Shore Limited includes no breakdown of the pairs of stations between which passengers traveled. (Of course, Pittsfield’s 13,464 passengers in fiscal year 2024 could only be riding the Lake Shore Limited or Berkshire Flyer.)

Still, it seems likely the demand could be there. Absent a belief in the growth potential, Amtrak probably would not have eagerly worked with the Commonwealth on its plans for service expansions between Boston and Western Mass and beyond.

New York state has a stake here, too, and has shown interest in new and additional service to Albany. However, a spokesperson for the Empire State’s Transportation Department referred questions about service expansions to the office of Governor Kathy Hochul.

Ultimately, the Lake Shore Limited will be rolling in Massachusetts again long before new service begins. The start date for additional trains between Boston and Springfield has slipped to 2030 from an earlier date of 2029.

Less controversially, the two new roundtrips are expected to operate as revivals of the Inland Route. Amtrak had, at one time, operated a couple of its Northeast Corridor trains via Worcester, Springfield and Hartford. Today, that service runs exclusively along the now-electrified shoreline route via Providence and New London.

In June, MassDOT did approve a capital investment plan that includes $149 million to advance projects pertaining to Compass Rail. It is unclear whether this includes the $108 million grant Massachusetts received to start up the Boston-Springfield service from the feds. (The federal government obligated that money in January.) Still, East-West rail construction is not expected to begin until 2027. MassDOT did say design work has begun, however.

More optimistically, the change of administration in Washington has not soured the feds on East-West rail. MassDOT received a $3.5 million grant to advance planning for service along the Boston & Albany route beyond the two promised roundtrips. The process it will fund includes outreach, infrastructure planning and designing service. However, there is no date for such service to arrive. Nor is there much sense of what that service may be.

It could be decades before passengers can enjoy the benefits of regular and frequent service from one end of the Commonwealth to the other.