> Under US law, if Amtrak runs a train on freight rail networks, Amtrak gets priority. In reality, freight operators tell Amtrak to go fuck themselves and Amtrak duly complies.
It’s a bit more complex than that. All train journeys are scheduled ahead of time down to the block level, to ensure that only one train will ever occupy any given block at any given time. During this scheduling process conflicts are inevitable. Each conflict must be resolved somehow, and usually it is done by having one train wait in a siding for the other to depart the conflicted block. If one of these trains is a passenger train, then the law requires that the passenger train must always be given priority. This means that the other train must enter the siding and stop while the passenger train passes.
The freight companies always follow this rule, except for one tiny exception.
Consider what happens when one of the two trains cannot fit into any of the sidings. It wouldn’t do any good for that train to enter a siding and stop, because the back of the train would still be occupying the main line. Instead, the short train must use a siding and allow the longer one to pass.
Back in the 70s when Amtrak was founded and the law was written there just weren’t any long trains. But long trains are definitely more efficient, especially when they only have one type of cargo and all the cars are going to the same place. For one thing, the short trains need a lot more conductors and engineers than the single long train does.
So you can see that when an Amtrak train conflicts with a 2–mile–long coal train, it will definitely be the Amtrak train that ends up waiting. However, this does not _delay_ the Amtrak train, because it is built into the schedule. The Amtrak train has a published arrival time, and getting there on time assumes that it will be stopped for a certain amount of time waiting for that long train to pass.
There are people who think that the freight companies are breaking the law here, but the core fact is that the law simply doesn’t say anything about it; it simply assumes that either train could wait in the siding for the other. I believe it’s been brought up in Congress even, but there’s not been enough political will to amend the law; certainly Congress could ban long trains, or require the track owner to build sidings long enough to accommodate them, etc.
There is also the issue that a _late_ train loses priority. If an Amtrak train departs late (or is delayed during the trip somehow), then it could end up waiting on trains that it was originally scheduled to go ahead of, and this can make it later.
Funny story time: I was taking a trip on the Zephyr. We were delayed for ~20 minutes shortly after leaving Denver because the train ran over a shopping cart. The conductor got on the intercom and apologized for the delay, but of course they had to dig the remains of the cart out from under the engines and inspect them for damage. The train had been on time up til that point; they made up some time during the night, but we were still late getting in to Chicago. Fun times!