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Comment by PaulDavisThe1st | Hacker News Reader

This is disingenous.

There is no "rail network" about which the US (through some political process) makes decisions about prioritization.

There is a freight rail network, and there is Amtrak's rails between Boston and DC. That's it. We're not prioritizing freight, the network is owned by freight companies.

Also, with regards to percentages, this is the wrong comparison. The numbers you need (which I could not find) are what percentage of cargo travels to within Nkm of its destination by trail in the USA, where N is the typical value for Europe. We have substantial freight hauling in the US because of long distance journeys. The last Nkm is generally done by truck. In Europe, there is much less long distance freight hauling, and much more hauling that takes place under the Nkm "limit", ergo more is done by truck.

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Although under the law that created Amtrak, the track owners are supposed to give priority to passenger trains. I don't think that's been enforced for 30+ years (maybe ever) so freight is prioritized since it makes the owners more money.

That's fair enough, but that leaves a certain level of ambiguity (or perhaps ambivalence) about what is prioritized by government. What we can say is that the track owners' priorities are clear.

The Biden administration did begin to take steps to enforce the law in this area, but I think it did not get very far and will almost certainly cease in the new administration.

No, Amtrak trains are always prioritized. Well, almost always.

Every train journey is planned in advance, so that each block of rail is reserved for a specific train and only that train. When those reservations are made, Amtrak trains get priority over freight trains. However, in recent decades the average length of the freight trains has increased greatly. This results in trains that are too long to fit on any of the sidings. This means that it is possible for a freight train to be in a place where it cannot pull into a siding and allow an Amtrak train to pass or overtake it. The law simply does not anticipate this scenario, and it cannot force the freight companies (who own most of the track) to extend their sidings to accommodate the larger trains or to change the length of their trains. I believe that the FRA has tried to resolve this for some time, but unsuccessfully. At this point it will take either a big lawsuit or an act of Congress to fix the problem.

It should also be noted that if an Amtrak train is forced to stop and wait on some other train, that this does not delay the Amtrak train. The stop is part of the train’s schedule so while it makes the trip longer it doesn’t make the train late.

On the other hand, an Amtrak train that is _already_ late loses its reservations and therefore could get delayed even more by freight trains. No guarantees though; sometimes they make up time simply because there are no freight trains in the way.

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