Acela in the context of "Passenger train"

Inter-city rail services are express trains that run services that connect cities over longer distances than commuter or regional trains. They include rail services that are neither short-distance commuter rail trains within one city area nor slow regional rail trains stopping at all stations and covering local journeys only. An inter-city train is typically an express train with limited stops and comfortable carriages to serve long-distance travel.

Inter-city rail sometimes provides international services. This is most prevalent in Europe because of the proximity of its 50 countries to a 10,180,000-square-kilometre (3,930,000-square-mile) area. Eurostar and EuroCity are examples. In many European countries, the word InterCity or Inter-City is an official brand name for a network of regular-interval and relatively long-distance train services that meet certain criteria of speed and comfort. That use of the term appeared in the United Kingdom in the 1960s and has been widely imitated.

The Northeast Corridor (NEC) is an electrified railroad line in the Northeast megalopolis of the United States. Owned primarily by Amtrak, it runs from Boston in the north to Washington, D.C., in the south, with major stops in Providence, New Haven, Stamford, New York City, Newark, Trenton, Philadelphia, Wilmington, and Baltimore. The NEC is roughly paralleled by Interstate 95 for most of its length. Carrying more than 2,200 trains a day, it is the busiest passenger rail line in the United States by ridership and service frequency.

The corridor is used by many Amtrak trains, including the high-speed Acela (formerly Acela Express), intercity trains, and several long-distance trains. Most of the corridor also has frequent commuter rail service, operated by the MBTA (Keolis), CT Rail, Metro-North Railroad, Long Island Rail Road, New Jersey Transit, SEPTA, and MARC. While large through freights have not run on the NEC since the early 1980s, some sections still carry smaller local freights operated by CSX, Norfolk Southern, CSAO, Providence and Worcester, New York and Atlantic, and Canadian Pacific. CSX and NS partly own their routes.

An express train is a type of passenger train that makes few or no stops between its origin and destination stations, usually major destinations, providing faster service than local trains that stop at many or all of the stations along their route. They are sometimes referred to by terms such as "fast train" or "high-speed train", e.g. the German Schnellzug. Though many high-speed rail services are express, not all trains described as express have been much faster than other services; trains in the United Kingdom in the 19th century were called expresses as long as they had a "journey speed" of at least 40 miles per hour (64 km/h). Express trains sometimes have higher fares than other routes, and bearers of a rail pass may be required to pay an extra fee. First class may be the only one available.Some express train routes that overlap with local train service may stop at stations near the tail ends of the line. This can be done, for example, where there is no supplemental local service to those stations. Express train routes may also become local at times when ridership is not high enough to justify parallel local service, such as at nighttime.