14 ms·

Great to have access to that information. - Empire Builder near Minneapolis: 10h late. - Empire Builder near Kalispell: 6h late. Passenger train service in A

• vertex-four 8y ago
  The issue isn’t who runs it, it’s that the trains don’t have tracks to reasonably run on. Elsewhere, when passenger trains are delayed, every effort is made to get them back on time again - in America, they’re left for hours in a siding while freight trains go by.
  • JKCalhoun 8y ago
    Yep, freight has right of way.
    • gok 8y ago
      No. Legally, Amtrak always has priority over freight. There are cases where host railroads are badly behaved but more often the problem is that Amtrak is poorly operated.
    • jessaustin 8y ago
      Rightly so. Rail freight is important in USA, while rail travel is not. We already have too many semi trucks on the roads; it would be foolish to force more freight onto the highways to pander to some dream about rail travel.
      • ghaff 8y ago
        I wouldn't worry too much about that. My understanding is that rail freight is about 10% the cost of trucking it.
  • rayiner 8y ago
    The northeast regional trains are routinely 30-50 minutes late, and Amtrak owns those tracks and has priority on them.
    • mattl 8y ago
      At least pieces of those lines are MetroNorth. They can slow things down out of NYC towards Boston.
    • pm24601 8y ago
      That is to be expected with underinvestment.
• michaelleslie 8y ago
  Ahh, the classic, "We've defunded and gutted this government program. Look! Government doesn't work!" that the American right traffics in. The private sector is the reason for these delays. http://blog.amtrak.com/2015/02/message-amtrak-regarding-time-performance/ http://blog.amtrak.com/2015/02/message-amtrak-regarding-time...
  • kevin_thibedeau 8y ago
    Except that Amtrack is consistently late on the NEC and other regional lines that they have priority on. Really annoying when you are on a train waiting to pull out of a station and can't go because a late Amtrack has priority.
    • michaelleslie 8y ago
      That's a good point. I know Penn is a major bottleneck (we have Christie to thank for that after killing ARC), and there's the added problem of delays conflicting with Metro North/NJT schedules. We need infrastructure investment in dense corridors if we're to get anywhere remotely near European or Asian standards.
      • rayiner 8y ago
        It's not clear to me we even have "dense corridors" like in Europe. I was in Munich, and driving in from the airport what struck me is that the city just ends. The city is 1.5 million people. Then there is another million or so people in the metro area, and 30 minutes outside of downtown its farms. Contrast Philadelphia, which is at the center of the U.S. "northeast megalopolis." It's also 1.5 million people, but there are another 4.5 million people in the surrounding sprawl. You can go an hour outside Philly in almost any direction and still be in suburban sprawl. That totally changes the transit equation. You build high-speed rail to Munich, and you're serving more than half the population of the metro area. You build high-speed rail to Philly, and you serve just a quarter of the population (while the other three quarters is stuck paying for something they have to drive to get to anyway). This is true at multiple levels of scale. Compare Ulm, Germany to Richmond, VA. Both are about 100-200k people. Aside from a few appendages, you hit farms 2-3 miles outside Ulm in most directions. Richmond, by contrast, is surrounded for 8-10 miles in all directions by suburbs, which have another million people. When it comes to voting for things like transit or train service, the people in the city that might benefit from it are totally outnumbered by all the people in the suburbs who can't.
• jccalhoun 8y ago
  Apparently that track is undergoing work https://www.amtrak.com/alert/empire-builder-track-work-delays.html https://www.amtrak.com/alert/empire-builder-track-work-delay... I can't imagine that a private company would bother running a passenger route from chicago to the pacific northwest.
• kennydude 8y ago
  Hahaha. Have you seen how it works in England? Yet again the East Coast route has returned to public hands because the private operator felt "it wasn't profitable enough"
  • Fukkaudeku 8y ago
    LNER (the public operator that replaced it) is pretty good, too; my train from King's Cross to Edinburgh was only 6 minutes late to arrive (very little jitter for a 4.5hr service) and the service onboard was great too.
• mercutio2 8y ago
  Privately operated passenger railroads were (somewhat) more reliable, but not profitable, which is why Amtrak exists.
  • mkempe 8y ago
    Have you inquired into why they became unprofitable? Have you considered the massive government investments into and subsidies for the two other modes of transportation following WW II?
    • compuguy 8y ago
      Passenger trains in the US died off in the late 1960s because of automobiles and the Interstate Highway System (don't forget airplanes).
    • AnimalMuppet 8y ago
      I don't think they were ever profitable. I think they became unbearably more unprofitable after WWII, but I think they were unprofitable before that. And, when you talk about government investments into the two other modes of transportation, I presume you mean air and highways. You forgot waterways - also created/improved with government investment.