Amtrak is rolling out a new fleet of high-speed Acela trains this month, the passenger rail company announced Thursday, after years of delays in the manufacturing process.

Five of 28 new trains will make their first trips with passengers Aug. 28 up and down the dense Northeast Corridor, from Washington to Boston, Amtrak spokesperson Beth Toll said. The rest will roll into service over the next two years.

The new model, called NextGen Acela, is Amtrak’s fastest train, hitting top speeds of 160 mph. It’s no maglev, but it can get you from Baltimore to New York City in about two hours and 20 minutes, roughly a half-hour faster than a standard Amtrak train.

Not only will the fleet expand to 28 from 20 once the new Acelas replace the old ones, but the new trains will accommodate more passengers. Seating on each train will expand to 384 from 304, Toll said.

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“NextGen Acela is more than a new train — it’s an evolution of travel,” Amtrak President Roger Harris said in an emailed news release. The debut will “launch a new standard for American train travel,” he added.

The overdue announcement comes roughly nine years after Amtrak awarded a contract to private company Alstom, which faced a series of delays in manufacturing the trains at its facility in upstate New York. Company officials have cited supply chain issues related to the pandemic for the delays, but complications that arose during track testing also contributed, according to media reports.

Alstom is also the company that Maryland contracted with for a major rehabilitation project on the Baltimore light rail vehicles that was the center of that system’s two-week shutdown in late 2023.

Amtrak has been active locally, with ongoing upgrades at Baltimore’s Penn Station and major capital projects such as the Frederick Douglass Tunnel Program in West Baltimore kicking into gear. Much of the work was supercharged by the 2021 infrastructure bill championed by former President Joe Biden, an avid Amtrak supporter.

The passenger rail company hopes to grow its ridership to 66 million by 2040.