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Comment by tuke | Hacker News Reader

The post suggests that "freight trains have priority."

By law, passenger travel is expected to have "precedence."

Read: https://www.amtrak.com/content/dam/projects/dotcom/english/p...

While technically true, that law is never enforced, so in practice OP's statement is sadly correct. Wendover Productions made a great video [0] explaining this situation.

[0]: https://youtu.be/qQTjLWIHN74?t=07m40s

Interesting! Your link suggests that legally passenger trains are supposed to have priority, but that in practice freight trains are given priority.

I didn't know this, and it makes me even madder! But as far as an explanation for why Amtrak trains are so often delayed (which is how it appeared in OP?), it appears to be correct that it's because freight trains are given priority. It's just that... they're not supposed to be, right?

At least according to Amtrak? I wonder if anyone has a third-party analysis of what's going on? I'm surprised I've never heard this before, thank you for bringing it up.

> The leading cause of delay to Amtrak passengers is “freight train interference”...

> ...Myth: “Amtrak already has the highest priority of all trains on freight rail lines.”

> Truth: Freight trains represent the largest cause of delay to passengers.

The TLDR is that most of the US is single tracked and the freight trains are bigger than the passenger train has to wait even if it has priority because the freight train is too big to wait.

Also, because Wall Street is so obsessed with making the balance sheets as efficient as possible, they have pretty much no interest in capital improvements like longer sidings or additional tracks.

It's worse than that. They have a specific interest in not having longer sidings. The companies that own the tracks own the freight trains, so longer sidings would be worse since then their trains would have to yield.

There is something called "Precision Scheduled Railroading" (PSR) which ultimately means that freight trains are longer than they used to be. (https://www.gao.gov/products/gao-23-105420) The result is that these long trains (even 3 miles long) can't fit on sidings, which means that they can't practically give way to, say, Amtrak, when there's only a single track. (Which is a lot of routes!)

In other words, freight rail has optimized very hard on saving costs, and since they own the tracks, there's not much Amtrak can do to win.

I think the only real solution is dedicated, grade-separated tracks for passenger trains (ideally high speed), but that's unfortunately a pipe dream :(

The real solution is to eliminate private ownership of track. Corporate-owned track makes as much sense as corporate-owned highways, ie none. The rails should belong to the people, and companies allowed to use them as the government allows, not the other way around.

Britain seems to have a better system than the US. In the US the rails are privately owned, but the train service is operated by the government. In Britain the rails are owned by the state but the operators are private. That seems to make for a better experience.

Britain has gone through regular and repeated crises with their trains, and pretty much the entire system went bankrupt during COVID. The government paid what it took to keep it going, but it's not a smooth system by any means. Even during what people would consider the heyday of British Rail, it still required significant and ongoing government subsidies:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_rail_transport_in_G...

As does the road network. And schools. Goverent services require subsidies, they aren’t run for profit.

And the subsidies given the the rail which were needed because of the governemt laws about not travelling were far lower than US subsidies.

Better only in narrow relative terms. The privatised trains are a disaster of Tory politics and renationalisation is a vote winning proposal. The lines which gave most problems have been resumed by the state in some cases.

I miss BR. Bit of a shame it was Jimmy Saville voicing "this is the age of the train"

Rail demands subsidy. Public utility functions often do.

I would say the exact opposite. Eliminate government ownership of the trains. The government is not "the people". It's a monopoly maintained by violence.

This is a good summary. The other element is that Amtrak only gets priority if they stay to their schedule. They have a slot where they are expected, and have full priority. However, if they get delayed, and miss their slot, then another train will get in front of them, and then they're further delayed, etc., etc. The dispatchers can give them priority when there are two trains waiting to enter a segment, but that doesn't help if the segment is 90 miles long, Amtrak would run it in an hour at 90mph, but the freight train that left 20 minutes ago at 45mph is going to be in that segment for 2 hours total. Nothing Amtrak can do will allow it to be passed, especially if the freight is longer than any sidings that are available for enforcement.

Some additional enforcement might help, but in the end, with most of the network having large single-track sections, and the long trains of PSR, it's just not a network built for timeliness. About 50% of the train load in America is bulk commodities of one form or another (Coal, stone, grain, etc.) All of these commodities are generally stable and non-spoilable. Thus, the customers don't really care much about punctuality. A power plant can maintain some hours or days of inventory in a big pile next to the plant. If the train with the next load of coal is 8 hours late, it has little impact, you just dig a little deeper into the pile before it's refreshed. 8 hours is a big difference to passengers.

Is it impossible to expand the sidings? Maybe make them 5 miles long? Sure it's not free, but it doesn't seem like it should be outrageously expensive. Is this just classic underinvestment in infrastructure coming back to bite you in the butt?

Not impossible, probably slow. Land must be acquired, base and track laid, switches moved, etc, etc.

When the cause of the initial delay could be getting bumped by a freight train in the first place... that is particularly frustrating chain of events.

Yeah, the main issue is mostly that the network is designed for lowest-cost, non-time-sensitive freight, and fast, time-sensitive Amtrak trains inevitably get stuck behind something slow, or waiting for something slow to clear from the other direction. A passenger-first network would look like Japan, with lots of double-track, few sharp turns, etc. It would cost more overall too.

With all the lawyers in this country you’d think one of them on the train would use their hours long delay to assemble a law suit against the freight rail companies. What an insulting deal for taxpayers!

The problem is that the DoJ is the one with the power to enforce said regulations, and DoJ is about as interested as a patrol officer being asked to do parking enforcement.

There have been bills to allow Amtrak to file civil suits but as far as I know they haven’t passed.

Here's the specifics in the law. U.S. Code Title 49 § 24308 - Use of facilities and providing services to Amtrak

https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/49/24308

https://uscode.house.gov/view.xhtml?req=24308&f=treesort&fq=...

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