Amtrak wants to shift America’s “car-first mindset”.
Its newest marketing technique to convince Americans that taking the train is better than driving: mimicking advertising tropes from luxury-car TV commercials.
Amtrak’s upcoming ad campaign, “The Build,” opens like a typical high-end automaker spot, with a swaggering musical soundtrack and a narrator reeling off superlatives like “state of the art engineering” and “electrifying speed.”
The ad’s reveal is that the “smoothest ride on the road” is actually an Amtrak NextGen Acela high-speed train.
Eliot Hamlisch, Amtrak’s chief commercial officer, said the bulk of its current marketing output is about helping the traveling public see passenger rail as a preferred mode of transport.
“You’re not stuck in traffic on the I-95, you’re not stuck in a middle seat while circling above Reagan Airport not able to go to the bathroom,” Hamlisch said in an interview with Business Insider.
He said Amtrak is taking “a really bold and very confident approach to the messaging, the creative, the music, to help highlight those amenities and benefits that differentiate this train relative to cars and planes.”
“The Build” ad, part of its broader long-running “Retrain Travel” campaign, debuts on linear TV during the Kentucky Derby weekend.
Amtrak’s advertising outlay: the numbers
Around 80% of Amtrak’s ad spending for “The Build” is directed toward “awareness driving media,” such as TV, digital video, and podcasts, versus 20% of ads designed to prompt people to buy a ticket immediately, Hamlisch said.
About a quarter (26%) of US adults in data-intelligence firm Morning Consult’s latest nationwide survey said they would consider becoming Amtrak customers, up slightly from 23% when the “Retrain Travel” campaign first kicked off in 2024. Brand awareness has remained at 83% since 2024, Morning Consult said.
Amtrak’s ad spend is low compared to airlines and automakers. The quasi-public national rail service spent $36 million on advertising in 2025, down from $39 million a year earlier, even as ticket revenue rose 10% to $2.7 billion. Hamlisch said he anticipates the company’s ad spend will stay at a similar level this year.
Its marketing is focused less on winning market share and more on introducing its new Acela fleet and reshaping perceptions of train travel among people who may have only historically considered flying or driving between major city centers on its Northeast corridor routes, Hamlisch said.
Internal numbers benchmarked against airline data show that Amtrak has an 80% market share of trips between New York City and Washington, DC, and a 65% share between New York City and Boston, Hamlisch said. It has lower penetration on its slower and long-distance routes elsewhere in the country.
Amtrak has been steadily ramping up its social presence as it seeks to convert Gen Z to train travel. Last July, an Amtrak video spoofing retro monster truck rally TV ads went viral across platforms like Instagram and YouTube.
“That’s not something you would ever have anticipated seeing come through an Amtrak social channel, or any other for that matter, in the past,” Hamlisch said.
Rail’s momentum
Amtrak is riding strong momentum. Ridership hit a record 34.4 million trips in its 2025 fiscal year, which ended in September, up 5% year over year. The rail service aims to nearly double that to 66 million annually by 2040 as it upgrades tracks, stations, and trains. (That number is still small compared to the likes of the New York City Metropolitan Transit Authority, which saw nearly 1.9 billion annual trips as of late 2025 across the subway, buses, and paratransit.)
Amtrak was a major beneficiary of the 2021 bipartisan infrastructure law, which gave it about $22 billion over five years to upgrade and modernize its service. It received a further boost in April, when the Trump administration announced a $4.7 billion investment in rail projects along Amtrak’s Northeast Corridor.
Another tailwind: Air travel in the US has been a mess for the past several months, prompting some passengers to consider taking the train instead.
“We certainly don’t aim to take advantage of that,” by dialing up marketing in response, Hamlisch said.
Though it is steadily rolling upgraded Acela stock, supported by its aspirational ad campaign, a lot of the Amtrak fleet is aging, with the average railcar about 33 years old, per a 2024 Bureau of Transportation Statistics report. Plus, Amtrak must manage delays and disruptions that come with improvement works to old tracks, bridges, and tunnels.
“Managing customer expectations is arguably the No. 1 thing that I wake up thinking about each day,” Hamlisch said.
