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Comment by bmc7505 | Hacker News Reader

As a frequent Amtrak passenger, I can attest to the unpunctuality of the Union Pacific and other freight operators. On several occasions we have been delayed by a passing freight train that was an hour or more behind schedule, causing us to miss our scheduled connection. During one such occasion, while traveling on the Coast Starlight from Eugene this summer, I was treated very rudely by the conductor, who kicked me out of the dining car despite having a reservation. Precision scheduled railroading is anything but precise.

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The real problem here is that freight trains have so much priority in the US, unlike every other major country in the world.

It doesn't matter how many or what kinds of trains we have. This sort of policy will always makes trains an unreliable and therefore impractical mode of transportation.

And this is a major reason for the US leading the world in carbon consumption per capita.

Nit: I couldn’t find a source that indicated the US leads in carbon consumption per capita, although it is near the top.

For instance:

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/consumption-co2-per-capit...

More to the point, as several other comments noted the official policy is to prioritize passenger rail, which clearly wasn’t happening, so hopefully events such as these will begin to change that.

>the official policy is to prioritize passenger rail

Define "official"

>hopefully events such as these will begin to change that.

What events?

If you think this was a rare case, you obviously don't ride Amtrak long distance much. Most interstate Amtrak trips get delayed by freight, and it has been that way for decades.

The official policy, in that it is literally US law. The subject of the article is an attempt to enforce said provisions.

Sure, but there is no precedent for such regulation as long as the railroads are privately owned by the same corporations that control congress. This is yet another case of HN Utopianism.

Why would there need to be a precedent? The regulation has been in place for forty-five years. It's the law. Congress passed it. The only new aspect is that Amtrak can now request these investigations, where previously it was the sole purview of the Department of Justice, an organization famously known for not being Congress.

They only have de facto priority; officially passenger trains are supposed to be prioritized. This is in fact the basis of the complaint described in the article.

That is just plain wrong. In practice, of the 30+ interstate Amtrak trips I've taken in the past 10 years, the overwhelming majority of them are delayed by freight rail. It is standard operating procedure.

Yes, that's what de facto priority means. Since the railroads operate the lines and the freight trains, they (illegally) give their own freight trains priority over Amtrak passenger trains, which by law are supposed to have priority.

That is not what de facto means, but regardless what is the point in even mentioning it if it were?

It's actually exactly what de facto means. Amtrak has de jure priority, but freight has de facto priority, because the freight carriers are gaming the system by running over-long trains and other assorted foot-dragging with respect to compliance.

This isn't true. Amtrak has priority by law over freight in the US as long as they are on time. They don't get priority once they area late. What happens is that Amtrak becomes late and then they lose their slot and become further late.

But as far as I know there is no enforcement action taken when the freight railroads violate that priority.

What happens when late freight makes Amtrak late? You can't just make a freight train evaporate from the track because Amtrak has priority.

You can make the freight train wait at the merge. It's not rocket science.

Freight trains can be very long. If it's already occupying the track, it's too late to make it wait.

The problem is that freight transporters are intentionally running trains which are longer than the sidings. Even if an Amtrak train has priority by law, it is - by design - impossible for the freight train to pull over.

The result is that an on-time Amtrak train has to wait for a delayed freight train, because it is physically impossible to do anything else. This of course results in the Amtrak train now being late, through no fault of its own.

> This of course results in the Amtrak train now being late, through no fault of its own.

I'm going to give the tried and true answer everyone receives (at airports at least): it doesn't matter why your late. It's your responsibility. You should've left earlier and predicted the future.

Amtrak should've already built their own rails and should be serving much more of the country. I dont know anyone who can even consider Amtrak for travel.

It is not impossible to deal with this. The Amtrak train could go onto the siding and then the freight train could back up, allowing the Amtrak train to reenter the main track ahead of the freight train.

Good point, but at the end of the day it's still ultimately a political problem.

Honestly we need to build parallel rights of way anyways.

The freight rails are slow and dilapidated. It would make more sense for passenger railways to be separated from freight railways entirely rather than to try and squeeze into inadequate trackage. We don’t try to unload air freight through passenger terminals or vice versa.

Good luck with that. The only thing we've been able to do in the last few decades is close railways altogether.

That makes sense on some corridors but I'm not sure about the economics of building 2000 miles of dedicated right of way for a train that runs 3 times a week. Maybe if price, reliability, and speed of the service improved to such a degree it could feasibly compete with air and highway travel between those cities.

Chicken and egg. Running 3 times a week slowly and expensively isn't going to increase ridership.

The good news is that most of the population lives in corridors that would make sense.

The I-5 coast and everything west of I-35 represents most of the US population. In particular, Chicago, Atlanta, and New York form a triangle roughly 700 miles on each side. This is roughly the distance between Beijing and Shanghai, or Tokyo to Fukuoka, both of which see high speed trains regularly making the full journey.

The government frankly doesn't have it in it to do a project like that anymore. Can you imagine the outcry when they have to eminent domain some poor peoples property?

>Can you imagine the outcry when they have to eminent domain some poor peoples property?

No, I can't, but I don't have to imagine the insurmountable resistance when the government merely suggests using eminent domain on a rich person's property.

Besides, poor people don't own property in the US anymore.

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