After decades of being underfunded, Amtrak can finally afford to keep its current fleet of trains running and also invest in essential infrastructure upgrades, writes Paolo Confino for Fortune.

The newfound prosperity arrived when Amtrak got a transformative commitment of $66 billion as part of Congress’ $1 trillion bipartisan infrastructure bill in late 2021. This is quadruple the amount it received in the previous six years.

“We’ve always lived hand to mouth, year to year,” said Amtrak CEO Stephen Gardner. “It made it incredibly difficult to do multi-year programs, because we might have the money to start them and pay for year one, but no idea whether we’d have money in year two or four or six.”

Amtrak is already seeing improvements to its commercial performance thanks to these investments. In the final three months of 2023, its ridership was 15 percent above pre-pandemic levels.

But even with highly-needed federal funding, Amtrak still faces challenges, including the complexity and number of the projects it is implementing.

“The big change for me as a leader, and for the company in general, is building up this new capacity to design and construct these assets that are enormous in and of themselves,” said Gardner. “Any one of these projects is several billion dollars, and we’re launching 10 of them at the same time.”

Read more about Amtrak’s new funding in Fortune.

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