Avelia Liberty testing at Princeton Junction, New Jersey - March 7th, 2025

Published on 2026-01-11 by Admin

These videos are from the night of March 7, 2025 at Princeton Junction while track 1 was out of service. Note the platform cars and dark yellow grounding wire over track 1 connecting the catenary wire to the former signal bridge.

Thanks to The Philly Buff's video (at 3:06) from the previous day (March 6th) for the heads up. Between my videos and The Philly Buff's, these are probably the first documentation of any production Avelia trainset (trainset 2, the trainset used in qualification testing from 2020 to 2024, was considered prototype) running at track speed above type D speeds (greater than 95 MPH). Trainset 8 did a lot of brake testing for about 4 nights in March 2025 running as KP2022. Trainset 8, unlike Trainset 2, was fully furnished with interior fixtures.

In videos 1 and 3, the train had just done a complete stop about a quarter mile away. This particular round trip took over 1 hour, 20 minutes, with the test train sometimes mixing with other trains on the same track without absolute block.

Tags: New Jersey, Princeton Junction, Northeast Corridor, Amtrak, Acela, NextGen Acela, Avelia Liberty
Copyright: CC BY-SA 4.0 Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International Creative Commons License (see file link for download and full license information)
Files: https://archive.org/details/northeast-corridor-princeton-avelia-liberty-testing-2025-03-07
Flickr links: 0001, 0002, 0003