Slower Than A Speeding Bullet.

• Author: CARR, DAVID
• Position: Acela, Amtrak's new train

Why Amtrak's new Acela looks fast, but isn't.

TWO-YEAR-OLD RYAN KINNEY looks up as a steely apparition pulls silently into Boston's South Station. A smile fights its way in between cheeks engorged with half-chewed McNuggets.

"Acela," he says happily.

That's epic branding, a Pavlovian depth of consumer affiliation that makes marketing executives hug each other. And it's brought to you by Amtrak, the rail transportation apparatus of the U.S. government, an agency not historically celebrated for its warm relationship with the general public.

"It was one of his first words," says Ryan's grandmother, Barbara Hurley.

Every Tuesday afternoon, Hurley picks up Ryan and his four-year-old brother, Patrick, and heads for the Route 128 station outside Boston. They're all train freaks, the kind of civilians who live to be kissed by the wind of a passing behemoth. The three watch several trains go by before grabbing a local to the station for lunch, but nothing rivets Ryan like the Acela.

There's a reason for that. If a small child could conjure a grownup train, he might make something that looked like the Acela Express. (The nomenclature is a conflation of "acceleration" and "excellence.") Christened last November, Acela is a land jet with the nose of a 747 fronting a vast expanse of windowless grillwork that conceals tons of mechanical fury just waiting for a spark from the overhead wire. Back where the passengers sit, there's enough tricked-up gadgetry to put an arch in James Bond's eyebrow. On a northbound Boston trip recently, a guy in a suit stepped up to the whooshing electronic door at the end of car and said, "Open the pod door, Hal."

An American version of the bullet train, Acela is capable of speeds in excess of 150 miles an hour and tilts niftily up on its side to take the steepest bends, the better to keep those nasty G-forces at bay. As a matter of design, Amtrak's high-speed entrant is bolted together to avoid the pushes and pulls of common rail conveyances, and is powered by electric motors less noisy than a lot of room air conditioners. Double-size windows suffuse the church-quiet transportation pod with light. The chairs--designed after careful market research on 25,000 riders in the Northeast corridor--make the middle seats on a DC-9 seem medieval.

Such town-car amenities and aerodynamics didn't come cheap. The government-owned rail agency has sunk an unprecedented $1.7 billion into Acela, hoping to make the leap into the 21st century after largely bypassing the 20th. To hedge its bets with the traveling public, Amtrak spent millions just on marketing its land yacht--a full year before there was ever a train to ride on. The promise of a bona fide American bullet train has certainly caught the attention--and the imagination--of the American public, but thanks to a combination of politics and performance, Acela hasn't quite lived up to the hype.

When it pulled into the Boston station at 9:30 one night last summer, dozens of people surged out to meet it. But they were there to get a look at the equipment, not the people it brought. Acela is that rare piece of hardware, like the re-designed VW bug, that makes people smile involuntarily when they see it. Hurley says Acela has riveted her grandson from the moment he saw it: "It's so sleek and beautiful. But our understanding is that as pretty and modern as it is, it doesn't really save you much of any time."

Grandma Hurley may have a soft spot for trains, but she's no sucker. The quickest Acela can go between New York and Boston is three-and-a-half hours. Fifty years ago, the New Haven Railroad's Merchants Limited made the trip in four. Three-quarters of the way into its maiden season, the best the bullet can do is save you the same 30...