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Comment by chaps | Hacker News Reader

Um. The evidence very much shows how much of a shitshow Amtrak is.

Have a look at Grand Junction station delays for the past week[1]. Seven out of eleven have delays of over thirty minutes. Three of those are an hour late. One of them is a five hour delay.

And in 2023 so far [2] it's 376 out of 524 that are at least 30 minutes late. 291 of those over an hour. 71 are over four hours late. 15 were eight hours late. And one was delayed by over 1000 minutes (16.75hr).

A lot of this is because Amtrak doesn't have propriety over the lanes and has to yield to cargo traffic (though I'm not familiar with the nuances).

[1] https://juckins.net/amtrak_status/archive/html/history.php?t... [2] https://juckins.net/amtrak_status/archive/html/history.php?t...

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If you consider that Grand Junction is pretty much in the middle of a route from Emeryville, California to Chicago, which takes over two days, a delay of 30-60 minutes doesn't seem that huge anymore. Nevertheless, I guess Amtrak is only for people with plenty of time to spare - and the on-time performance won't improve as long as Amtrak trains are "second-class citizens" on freight companies' tracks.

Kinda missing the point by focusing on the 30-60 bracket there, friend.

You also need to consider the people who are on the train with delays. One of the sadder things I've seen is someone missing a post-midnight intercom announcement saying that all stops right before St Louis through Chicago would would be skipped (because delays), and they'd need to get on the next train. So when she inevitably didn't get off, she was forced to going all the way up to Chicago and had to get picked up by family and drive all the way back down to St. Louis.

Anywho.

I’ve also seen conductors do amazing things in service of customers, including radioing the train heading the other way and doing an unscheduled stop/meet to transfer a passenger who had missed their stop.

I feel he did it because he felt bad for not waking them up, but still.

If Amtrak wasn’t forbidden from competing with greyhound it’d be more reliable I feel, even if trains became busses a bit more often.

I've also been on the train during an unscheduled rendevous, at a station the northbound and southbound trains arrived out of order from their schedule, someone heading to a wedding got on the wrong train. It did seem pretty heroic to radio ahead and pause both trains to get the woman "back on track", shows that the conductors are in charge of their trains and the organization is still human.

Another legally imposed handicap is that they cannot compete with mail carriers - seems insane, the post offices used to be built on top of the terminals for good reason (adjacent to Chicago Union Station and NY Penn Station at least)

They can compete in one case - the transfer of human remains. Go trains?

Amtrak has legal priority. In practice this doesn’t mean much.

The legal means to enforce this was with the DOJ, which for Amtrak’s existence has had bigger fish to fry. Amtrak was granted the ability to sue freight carriers for enforcement in 2019, the first lawsuit is making its way through the legal process and Amtrak wants to establish it as case law for this legal priority.

Well that's a wild complex relationship I had no idea existed. Pretty fucked up.

What's the court # for that case? Are they explicit in their filings that they seek to change the case law?

I'm not sure if this is the same issue/case OP mentions. https://www.freightwaves.com/news/stb-will-investigate-amtra...

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