Ever since it was unveiled in New York City in the winter of 1999, Amtrak’s Acela high-speed train has been a disappointment. The service connecting Washington, New York, and Boston was relentlessly hyped in rail stations for a year before it came online. But the popularity and profitability of the service has fallen far short of Amtrak-boosters’ expectations. And the time gains from the high-speed trains, which are constrained by decrepit tracks, have been negligible. Now, of a piece with the history of a service that has been plagued by mechanical problems since before it was launched, Amtrak has been forced to mothball its Acela Express fleet because of cracks in brackets that attach shock absorbers to the locomotives. Two Acela Express trains came back into service yesterday, but the other 16 could be sidelined for weeks. In the meantime, the case builds for Amtrak’s dismantling.

Passengers forced to reroute onto Amtrak’s slower trains are inconvenienced only slightly — when you consider that the Acela shaves only 15 minutes off the New York to Washington trip — but the mishap is another blow to Amtrak on top of a derailment in Maryland and a government bailout earlier this summer. Amtrak, which has never shown itself capable of disappointing a majority in Congress despite its fiscal shenanigans, is running out of good will. Last year Amtrak reported its largest operating loss ever, $944 million. And in November the Amtrak Reform Council, a body set up by Congress in 1997, declared that Amtrak will fail to meet a 2002 congressional deadline for operational self-sufficiency. As Amtrak demands more than a billion dollars a year in subsidies and its critics hope to move in for the kill, Congress must now decide how to proceed.

In doing so it would do well to study the story of Acela. The new train was unveiled in New York in early 1999, but service was delayed by more than a year by a massive engineering foul-up. The Acela design is a modified version of a European high-speed train, but American rail regulations requiring a much heavier outer shell than European countries mandate created problems. As one House transportation committee staffer put it to the Sun, the Acela is basically a tank’s body with a Ferrari’s chassis. That’s what caused the excessive wheel wear that delayed Acela’s launch for a year, that’s the root of today’s shock-absorber problem, and that’s why Acela has the worst on-time record in Amtrak’s fleet, with 35 Acela Express breakdowns last month alone. On top of this, the Acela trains turn out to be a few inches too wide to reach their top speed of 180 mph on curves — when they tilt, they enter the “airspace” of trains on adjoining tracks.

That Amtrak botched Acela this badly is telling. The corporation had clearly staked its future on high-speed rail, with its former president George Warrington predicting profits from Acela approaching $200 million a year, and with plans in the works to build high-speed lines on the West Coast and all across the fruited plains. Neither vision has materialized. What’s left to be done now is to sever the beast like the giant, winding worm it is, and see which parts live and which parts die. The Northeast Corridor, where New York finds itself snuggly nestled, has a better shot at survival than some of the long-haul routes in Middle America. The most likely outcome, and the one proposed by the Amtrak Reform Council, would be for the track between Boston and Washington to be run by the states it touches, as a sort of super Port Authority. New York passengers could stop subsidizing freeloaders riding empty trains across country, while necessary upgrades could finally be performed on the East Coast’s deteriorating tracks. Before you know it, the region could have high-speed rail worthy of the name.