Upstate NY Gets Brightline West Trainset Order

By Jim Mathews / President & CEO

Today, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) stood up at a press conference on an industrial site in Horseheads, N.Y., to proclaim that “right here” in 2026, Siemens Mobility will start building the American Pioneer 220 high-speed trainsets for Brightline West in a brand-new facility.

“The long and short of it is this: the future of America's high-speed rail will be built right here in upstate New York,” Schumer said, accompanied by Machinists’ union leaders, local elected officials, Brightline CEO Mike Reininger, and Administrator Amit Bose of the Federal Railroad Administration. “Soon where we stand will be a massive 300,000-square foot facility building the fastest passenger trains we have ever had in the United States.”

In a year when I’ve seen, read about, and participated in a lot of really exciting plans only to be disappointed when they involve multi-decade timelines, it’s fantastic news to hear about a new factory getting built quickly, hiring well-paid union labor soon, and solidifying a supply chain and industrial base in the region that we need now to support the future of rail expansion in the U.S.

Oh, and even better? This is not something we just have to hope to see in 2040 or some other distant date. Workers will start building these trainsets in 2026, and Brightline West remains publicly committed to getting the Los Angeles to Las Vegas route up and running in time for the Olympics in 2028.

As an upstate New York kid, I can’t help but feel a special kind of pride in seeing today’s announcement. The new 300,000-square foot facility will create 300 direct jobs about 30 minutes’ drive from my house. Siemens notes that these will be the first true high-speed trainsets to be built in the U.S.

And that’s in addition to the many people already working about an hour down the road at Alstom in Hornell, N.Y., building Avelia Liberty trainsets for Amtrak’s near-high-speed Acela service on the Northeast Corridor.

“The rest of the world has high-speed rail, and we have to catch up, but we are now catching up in a very strong and good and positive way,” Schumer said during the press event.

Staff at the plant will include electro-mechanical assemblers, quality management, quality control, industrial production and test engineers, project management, supply chain management and logistics employees, “really good paying jobs,” Schumer said, “and that means more money in the stores and the restaurants and everything else here in Chemung County.”

It also means a supply base will likely begin to build around the facility, making the entire Southern Tier of New York State an even stronger area than it already is for designing, developing, and manufacturing the next generation of passenger rail vehicles.

Administrator Bose and I chatted briefly this afternoon by text about the importance of this effort, the creation of a solid U.S. manufacturing base, and the new industrial capacity that we’ll get once the plant is up and running. One of the biggest obstacles to expanding passenger rail in the U.S. has been the relatively limited U.S. industrial capacity to supply the equipment needed and today’s announcement will go a long way toward solving that problem.

You might get tired of hearing me say this, but this is yet another win for the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, also known as the Investment in Infrastructure and Jobs Act, or IIJA, which President Biden signed into law in 2021. In December last year Brightline West was awarded “up to” $3 billion from the BIL/IIJA’s Fed-State Partnership for Intercity Passenger Rail grant program to help support the new link between LA and Las Vegas.