On September 30, Amtrak will begin passenger service with two new Airo trainsets on the Cascades line connecting Vancouver, Seattle, Portland and Eugene. For the Pacific Northwest, this will be more than an upgrade to seats and windows: it marks the beginning of a fleet replacement after the painful crisis caused by the withdrawal of the aging Horizon cars in spring 2025. Airo trains will operate four trips on their first day; all eight trainsets ordered for the corridor are expected to enter service gradually by early 2027.
Mornings at King Street Station usually begin with rolling suitcases, the smell of coffee and the familiar low rumble of a diesel engine. Starting September 30, another silhouette will join that ritual: a green, cream and coffee-colored Airo train, whose livery evokes the conifer-covered slopes and snowy ridges of the Cascade Mountains. The Amtrak Cascades route will be the first in the country where Amtrak’s new American-built fleet carries passengers rather than undergoing testing.
Two trainsets will operate four daily trips. From Seattle, Airo will head north as train No. 516 at 8:30 a.m., arriving in Vancouver, British Columbia, at 12:30 p.m.; southbound, train No. 503 will depart at 7:10 a.m. and reach Eugene at 1:48 p.m. In the opposite direction, the new trains will operate evening services: No. 519 from Vancouver to Seattle, departing at 4:45 p.m., and No. 508 from Eugene to Seattle, departing at 4:30 p.m. For passengers, this means the familiar schedule will remain unchanged, but some of the most visible trips will feature an entirely different interior.
Each trainset has more than 300 seats, ergonomic seats with adjustable headrests, panoramic windows, individual power outlets and USB ports, free Wi-Fi, and digital displays with trip information. The café will offer food and drinks inspired by the Pacific Northwest. The trains include six spacious restrooms with touchless controls, automatic steps, clearer wayfinding and accessible seating throughout the train. For people with limited mobility, particularly important features include lifts, enlarged boarding areas and easier access to café services.
The novelty also comes with a more prosaic cost. On March 26, 2025, Amtrak removed the Horizon cars from service after inspections found corrosion in several cars, along with additional problem areas. On Cascades, Amfleet cars temporarily replaced them, but the fleet could not be restored to its previous size: many trains began operating with three cars instead of four. According to the Oregon Department of Transportation, this reduced the number of seats by about 30 percent and made sold-out trips—especially north of Portland—an everyday occurrence.
Airo will not, by itself, add new service frequencies: the corridor’s bottlenecks involve more than rolling stock. They also include track capacity, since freight and passenger trains share the same tracks. However, the new trainsets should restore more reliable capacity to the line and reduce its dependence on temporarily reassigned cars. They will operate as integrated trainsets rather than as collections of individual cars, changing the day-to-day work of the maintenance facilities as well.
In Seattle, King Street Yard is preparing for the transition. Amtrak is building an almost 100,000-square-foot maintenance facility there. By the time construction is completed in 2027, the site is expected to have two tracks for inspections and repairs, plus a separate track for cleaning and supplying the trains. Such infrastructure is rarely visible to passengers looking out toward Elliott Bay or the Willamette Valley, but it determines whether a modern train reaches the platform on time each morning.
Eight Airo trainsets are designated for Cascades; Amtrak also ordered two new locomotives and a spare cab car. Siemens Mobility is manufacturing the trainsets in California, with components supplied by nearly 100 vendors in 31 states. In total, Amtrak plans to introduce 83 Airo trainsets on more than a dozen routes. The next is expected to be Northeast Regional, where passenger service with the new trains is scheduled to begin in late 2027. But the first experience of this major national transformation will begin in Seattle—on an ordinary September weekday, with a train departing south at 7:10 a.m.
Based on: Amtrak to introduce upgraded, sleek Airo train sets on Cascades route