10 ms·

To European eyes, the delays on that journey (which the author dismisses with a shrug) are outrageous. Arriving an hour late at one stop, then 1h40m late to the

To European eyes, the delays on that journey (which the author dismisses with a shrug) are outrageous. Arriving an hour late at one stop, then 1h40m late to the next -- 93 miles away per google -- is ridiculous! You'd only get those sort of delays if there'd been a fatal accident on the line, or downed overhead power cables, or a similar major disruption, and the carrier would be issuing refunds and apologizing. Even here in the UK. Also, a nominal hour to cover 93 miles by rail, and just three trains a week, is just laughable. That's a tourism charter service, not a transport network. It's no wonder Americans don't think in terms of rail travel as mass transport. If you can't run trains like commuter planes, something's badly wrong.

fredoralive 6y ago
AIUI it’s partly due to priority rules. In most countries, passenger trains have priority over freight. Amtrak doesn’t own much rail itself, and mostly runs on 3rd party tracks. On these Amtrak only has priority if it’s running on time. So as soon as a train gets one delay, the various railway operators stop giving the train priority, and it just gets more delayed.
- protomyth 6y ago
  The penalties on cargo timing are pretty severe. If that cargo train is supposed to be somewhere to load / unload, it really is a problem if it doesn't arrive on time and costs the railroads money they do not want to pay. Cargo, as many SV startups have discovered, is much more profitable than passenger.
- klyrs 6y ago
  This boondoggle brought to you by the oil, gas, and auto lobbies; who paid our politicians to kneecap Amtrak and more generally, our rail industry. Bonus: libs are placated by nice bike trails on the bones of dead infrastructure, happy to "do their part" to reduce oil use and blissfully ignorant of the difference that electric trains would make in displacing diesel trucks.
  - montjoy 6y ago
    > libs are placated by... Sorry but you don’t know WTF are you talking about. Any proposal to expand train service and especially electric trains in MN is vehemently attacked by conservatives, often with the loss of federal money to support light rail expansion.
    - klyrs 6y ago
      Actually, I'm a cyclist who has participated in "rails to trails" advocacy. That was actually a statement of self-awareness and I know precisely WTF I'm talking about because I've talked to perhaps hundreds of other cyclists about this issue. It's easy to blame conservatives. But a huge portion of democrats take the same money and vote for the same bills, only they dig in their heels a little to score green points with trifling shit like rails to trails.
  - rhino369 6y ago
    Amtrak is clinging to an unprofitable business model (outside the Boston-DC route). 85% of adults in America have a car. The 15% (plus children) who don't can use Greyhound/Megabus buses, which are fine. Flights are generally more convenient for trips over 300 miles anyway. There is no significant use case for Amtrak. It doesn't take a conspiracy to make it unprofitable.
    - klyrs 6y ago
      There was a significant use case when Amtrak was gutted to make way for "modernization" of transit, which resulted in the urban sprawl and high rate of car ownership that you see today. And also, Amtrak is a quasi-public corporation like USPS. Its existence is meant to be a public good, not to be profitable.
    - freeopinion 6y ago
      I wonder how things might change if 1% of highway funding were diverted to rail funding. And if 1% of USPS funding went into funding mailcars on Amtrak trains. And if 1% of federal unemployment stimulus went into hiring new employees for rail. Maybe current funding dwarfs all those accumulated 1%s. I don't know. But maybe a dozen 1%s could help out a dozen other challenges and give a huge boost to passenger rail in the U.S.
rsynnott 6y ago
> That's a tourism charter service, not a transport network. My impression is that most US intercity passenger lines _are_ basically tourism services, and not used for normal intercity travel.
marcinzm 6y ago
The US is a massive country and in most of it rail is a niche. It's cheaper and faster to go by plane even counting security, getting there, getting from there and so on. Worst of all you need a car as local public transit is lacking so arriving in the middle of downtown via train is actually a negative as you can't easily rent a car. Amtrak has proper service in the areas where it's economically viable like the northeast. The rest of it loses money and is basically there because it's legally required. edit: San Francisco to LA, a relatively short trip as far as the US goes, is the same as going from London to Scotland. Seattle to LA is the same as London to Rome. That's not counting cross-country which makes those distances look small. Rail just isn't competitive at those distances.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
pmjordan 6y ago
This reminds me of the time we wanted to ride the Amtrak Coast Starlight from Seattle to San Jose on our trip to the US in 2014. It's supposed to be a scenic route, and takes about 24 hours for that leg. (The train carries on to LA IIRC.) When we got to the station in Seattle and checked in our bags they told us the train was at least 5 hours delayed, so we should go do something else for 3 hours and then come back for a status update. We also left our mobile number and email address with them in case there was anything else. (Though in theory they should already have had these from the ticket booking.) Anyway, we went off to a café round the corner (it was an apparently rare snowy day in Seattle - hence the delay, plus we didn't want to stray too far) and had some drinks and brunch. After about 2 and a half hours later we wanted to stretch our legs and wandered back to the station. Whereupon we were told the train had already left without us… but with our bags, but we could have a refund or take the train on a later day. ️ We only had overnight bags, and an onward journey planned the other end, plus we were now super annoyed so we ended up scrambling to find a flight that would get us there by the next day. That was the closest to the flight time I've ever bought an airline ticket, less than 3 hours I think. It worked out OK in the end, we got our bags from San Jose station the next morning as we'd beaten the train there, though the contents of one of the bags was damaged from rough handling.
goodcanadian 6y ago
On the other hand, in North America, massive amounts of freight are moved by rail, extremely efficiently, and railways are generally pretty profitable. A train might be a mile long (as a child, you count the cars as you go past on the highway, and 80 or so was pretty standard). The freight companies own the rails and their trains get priority over passenger trains. Via Rail has exactly the same problem in Canada. In contrast, in Europe, while some cargo is moved by rail, the focus is on passengers. Freight trains (all trains) are short, and passengers have priority over freight. A quick google brought this up, though I haven't read through it in full: https://www.freightwaves.com/news/railroad/us-and-european-freight-railroads-are-on-different-tracks https://www.freightwaves.com/news/railroad/us-and-european-f...
- protomyth 6y ago
  The US picked a different optimization. The combination of transportation modes from Rail, Truck, and Barge are amazingly important to the health of the country. Passenger rail had a brief time of importance but was passed by plane and car travel. When the fully automated, electric car and buses arrive, I would imagine that passenger rail in the US will disappear entirely except for nostalgia operations and metro systems already in operation. It is much easier to be B2B or B2G than deal with individual customers for any of the railroads, and getting passengers off the rail will be a bonus for them. The nodal nature of rail will always be a handicap compared to roads.
  - sjsamson 6y ago
    >The US picked a different optimization. The combination of transportation modes from Rail, Truck, and Barge are amazingly important to the health of the country. Passenger rail had a brief time of importance but was passed by plane and car travel. The US could have “chosen” to do both (there’s no single policy decision or document to point to), as it had done in its railroad heyday, and as other countries do (e.g. Switzerland, China, Russia, etc.). It was and continues to be a failure of public policy and political system that passenger rail is so bad, and even freight rail is as underinvested in. That’s not a knock on the other forms of transport, all of which form a vital part of a larger interconnected, intermodal transportation network, but rail should be an important trunk of that system given its capacity and efficiency. Yet rail has had the least amount of public financial and policy support. By comparison, the US has invested trillions of taxpayer dollars in building and maintaining millions of miles of publicly owned roads (almost all non-tolled), airports and Air Traffic Control (ATC) system, and seaports, canals, dredged harbors and navigable inland waterways, Vessel Traffic Service (VTS). >When the fully automated, electric car and buses arrive, I would imagine that passenger rail in the US will disappear entirely except for nostalgia operations and metro systems already in operation. It is much easier to be B2B or B2G than deal with individual customers for any of the railroads, and getting passengers off the rail will be a bonus for them. The nodal nature of rail will always be a handicap compared to roads. We do need autonomous, electric buses and trucks, but fully automated, electric railway technology exists now and has for many decades, and well over century in the case of electrification.[1][2] Standards-based electric trains and related technology are available for purchase off the shelf from multiple vendors, do not need to carry large battery packs in the vehicle, and no pie in sky hope for future automation of an insanely hard problem. Electric railways are the most optimized form of land-based transportation, and arguably the most overall. “The first rule of any technology used in a business is that automation applied to an efficient operation will magnify the efficiency. The second is that automation applied to an inefficient operation will magnify the inefficiency.” - Bill Gates [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_train_operation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_train_operation [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_automated_train_systems https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_automated_train_system...
fatnoah 6y ago
A related point is that of Amtrak's 21,000 or so route miles, only 623 are actually owned by Amtrak. In nearly every case, freight operators only tolerate Amtrak because they're required to. The money they get paid is a drop in the bucket of their revenue, so they do the minimum required. It's also worth remembering that the US is huge. For the routes many of these trains cover, especially west of the Mississippi River, you have a choice between plane, bus or train. Getting to an airport could be a 6+ hour drive, and 18 hours on a train is often a much more comfortable experience than 10 hours on a bus. Despite the not-so-great timekeeping, there are many rural areas where the train is still the best of options. Keep in mind how large the US is.
wasdfff 6y ago
The US has one of the best and most comprehensive railways on earth. The problem is that its a freight railway that passenger trains have to work around. In southern california the metrolink regional railways link the entire region, but take second fiddle to freight rail which kneecaps their utility unless you are working 9-5 in downtown LA. The entire network is tailored for that commute because thats the best they could do with the freight rail schedule. We need grade separation between freight and passenger trains before any regional or national network will ever improve, and amtrak and other agencies like metrolink have no money allocated for this.
okprod 6y ago
Yea the US is far behind other countries with regard to passenger rail service. A friend who thought Amtrak was fast got blown away when she rode the Shinkansen for the first time.
- freeopinion 6y ago
  Osaka to Tokyo on Shinkansen is ~500km and takes over 3 hours. Los Angeles to Las Vegas on Amtrak is ~500km and takes over 7 hours. Oh, except that you don't finish in Las Vegas. You finish in Kingman, AZ (more that 160km from Las Vegas) because that's as close as you can get with Amtrak. The Shinkansen is travelling through significantly populated areas on the trip. Amtrak is travelling through a barren desert.
  - fomine3 6y ago
    Osaka to Tokyo is about 2.5 hours if you use fastest Shinkansen.
nsgi 6y ago
> Also, a nominal hour to cover 93 miles by rail, and just three trains a week, is just laughable. The service frequency is laughable but an hour to cover 93 miles doesn't sound too bad. Plenty of intercity train services in the UK are slower than that. e.g. London Waterloo to Brockenhurst is 92 miles and takes about 1hr30 making three stops
Rapzid 6y ago
The one time I took Empire Builder, from Leavenworth to Seattle, it was 4.5 hours late. Luckily I had decided to spend the day in Seattle before catching my flight..

fredoralive 6y ago

AIUI it’s partly due to priority rules. In most countries, passenger trains have priority over freight. Amtrak doesn’t own much rail itself, and mostly runs on 3rd party tracks. On these Amtrak only has priority if it’s running on time. So as soon as a train gets one delay, the various railway operators stop giving the train priority, and it just gets more delayed.

protomyth 6y ago
The penalties on cargo timing are pretty severe. If that cargo train is supposed to be somewhere to load / unload, it really is a problem if it doesn't arrive on time and costs the railroads money they do not want to pay. Cargo, as many SV startups have discovered, is much more profitable than passenger.
klyrs 6y ago
This boondoggle brought to you by the oil, gas, and auto lobbies; who paid our politicians to kneecap Amtrak and more generally, our rail industry. Bonus: libs are placated by nice bike trails on the bones of dead infrastructure, happy to "do their part" to reduce oil use and blissfully ignorant of the difference that electric trains would make in displacing diesel trucks.
- montjoy 6y ago
  > libs are placated by... Sorry but you don’t know WTF are you talking about. Any proposal to expand train service and especially electric trains in MN is vehemently attacked by conservatives, often with the loss of federal money to support light rail expansion.
  - klyrs 6y ago
    Actually, I'm a cyclist who has participated in "rails to trails" advocacy. That was actually a statement of self-awareness and I know precisely WTF I'm talking about because I've talked to perhaps hundreds of other cyclists about this issue. It's easy to blame conservatives. But a huge portion of democrats take the same money and vote for the same bills, only they dig in their heels a little to score green points with trifling shit like rails to trails.
- rhino369 6y ago
  Amtrak is clinging to an unprofitable business model (outside the Boston-DC route). 85% of adults in America have a car. The 15% (plus children) who don't can use Greyhound/Megabus buses, which are fine. Flights are generally more convenient for trips over 300 miles anyway. There is no significant use case for Amtrak. It doesn't take a conspiracy to make it unprofitable.
  - klyrs 6y ago
    There was a significant use case when Amtrak was gutted to make way for "modernization" of transit, which resulted in the urban sprawl and high rate of car ownership that you see today. And also, Amtrak is a quasi-public corporation like USPS. Its existence is meant to be a public good, not to be profitable.
  - freeopinion 6y ago
    I wonder how things might change if 1% of highway funding were diverted to rail funding. And if 1% of USPS funding went into funding mailcars on Amtrak trains. And if 1% of federal unemployment stimulus went into hiring new employees for rail. Maybe current funding dwarfs all those accumulated 1%s. I don't know. But maybe a dozen 1%s could help out a dozen other challenges and give a huge boost to passenger rail in the U.S.

rsynnott 6y ago

> That's a tourism charter service, not a transport network. My impression is that most US intercity passenger lines _are_ basically tourism services, and not used for normal intercity travel.

marcinzm 6y ago

The US is a massive country and in most of it rail is a niche. It's cheaper and faster to go by plane even counting security, getting there, getting from there and so on. Worst of all you need a car as local public transit is lacking so arriving in the middle of downtown via train is actually a negative as you can't easily rent a car. Amtrak has proper service in the areas where it's economically viable like the northeast. The rest of it loses money and is basically there because it's legally required. edit: San Francisco to LA, a relatively short trip as far as the US goes, is the same as going from London to Scotland. Seattle to LA is the same as London to Rome. That's not counting cross-country which makes those distances look small. Rail just isn't competitive at those distances.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

pmjordan 6y ago

This reminds me of the time we wanted to ride the Amtrak Coast Starlight from Seattle to San Jose on our trip to the US in 2014. It's supposed to be a scenic route, and takes about 24 hours for that leg. (The train carries on to LA IIRC.) When we got to the station in Seattle and checked in our bags they told us the train was at least 5 hours delayed, so we should go do something else for 3 hours and then come back for a status update. We also left our mobile number and email address with them in case there was anything else. (Though in theory they should already have had these from the ticket booking.) Anyway, we went off to a café round the corner (it was an apparently rare snowy day in Seattle - hence the delay, plus we didn't want to stray too far) and had some drinks and brunch. After about 2 and a half hours later we wanted to stretch our legs and wandered back to the station. Whereupon we were told the train had already left without us… but with our bags, but we could have a refund or take the train on a later day. ️ We only had overnight bags, and an onward journey planned the other end, plus we were now super annoyed so we ended up scrambling to find a flight that would get us there by the next day. That was the closest to the flight time I've ever bought an airline ticket, less than 3 hours I think. It worked out OK in the end, we got our bags from San Jose station the next morning as we'd beaten the train there, though the contents of one of the bags was damaged from rough handling.

goodcanadian 6y ago

On the other hand, in North America, massive amounts of freight are moved by rail, extremely efficiently, and railways are generally pretty profitable. A train might be a mile long (as a child, you count the cars as you go past on the highway, and 80 or so was pretty standard). The freight companies own the rails and their trains get priority over passenger trains. Via Rail has exactly the same problem in Canada. In contrast, in Europe, while some cargo is moved by rail, the focus is on passengers. Freight trains (all trains) are short, and passengers have priority over freight. A quick google brought this up, though I haven't read through it in full: https://www.freightwaves.com/news/railroad/us-and-european-freight-railroads-are-on-different-tracks https://www.freightwaves.com/news/railroad/us-and-european-f...

protomyth 6y ago
The US picked a different optimization. The combination of transportation modes from Rail, Truck, and Barge are amazingly important to the health of the country. Passenger rail had a brief time of importance but was passed by plane and car travel. When the fully automated, electric car and buses arrive, I would imagine that passenger rail in the US will disappear entirely except for nostalgia operations and metro systems already in operation. It is much easier to be B2B or B2G than deal with individual customers for any of the railroads, and getting passengers off the rail will be a bonus for them. The nodal nature of rail will always be a handicap compared to roads.
- sjsamson 6y ago
  >The US picked a different optimization. The combination of transportation modes from Rail, Truck, and Barge are amazingly important to the health of the country. Passenger rail had a brief time of importance but was passed by plane and car travel. The US could have “chosen” to do both (there’s no single policy decision or document to point to), as it had done in its railroad heyday, and as other countries do (e.g. Switzerland, China, Russia, etc.). It was and continues to be a failure of public policy and political system that passenger rail is so bad, and even freight rail is as underinvested in. That’s not a knock on the other forms of transport, all of which form a vital part of a larger interconnected, intermodal transportation network, but rail should be an important trunk of that system given its capacity and efficiency. Yet rail has had the least amount of public financial and policy support. By comparison, the US has invested trillions of taxpayer dollars in building and maintaining millions of miles of publicly owned roads (almost all non-tolled), airports and Air Traffic Control (ATC) system, and seaports, canals, dredged harbors and navigable inland waterways, Vessel Traffic Service (VTS). >When the fully automated, electric car and buses arrive, I would imagine that passenger rail in the US will disappear entirely except for nostalgia operations and metro systems already in operation. It is much easier to be B2B or B2G than deal with individual customers for any of the railroads, and getting passengers off the rail will be a bonus for them. The nodal nature of rail will always be a handicap compared to roads. We do need autonomous, electric buses and trucks, but fully automated, electric railway technology exists now and has for many decades, and well over century in the case of electrification.[1][2] Standards-based electric trains and related technology are available for purchase off the shelf from multiple vendors, do not need to carry large battery packs in the vehicle, and no pie in sky hope for future automation of an insanely hard problem. Electric railways are the most optimized form of land-based transportation, and arguably the most overall. “The first rule of any technology used in a business is that automation applied to an efficient operation will magnify the efficiency. The second is that automation applied to an inefficient operation will magnify the inefficiency.” - Bill Gates [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_train_operation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_train_operation [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_automated_train_systems https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_automated_train_system...

fatnoah 6y ago

A related point is that of Amtrak's 21,000 or so route miles, only 623 are actually owned by Amtrak. In nearly every case, freight operators only tolerate Amtrak because they're required to. The money they get paid is a drop in the bucket of their revenue, so they do the minimum required. It's also worth remembering that the US is huge. For the routes many of these trains cover, especially west of the Mississippi River, you have a choice between plane, bus or train. Getting to an airport could be a 6+ hour drive, and 18 hours on a train is often a much more comfortable experience than 10 hours on a bus. Despite the not-so-great timekeeping, there are many rural areas where the train is still the best of options. Keep in mind how large the US is.

wasdfff 6y ago

The US has one of the best and most comprehensive railways on earth. The problem is that its a freight railway that passenger trains have to work around. In southern california the metrolink regional railways link the entire region, but take second fiddle to freight rail which kneecaps their utility unless you are working 9-5 in downtown LA. The entire network is tailored for that commute because thats the best they could do with the freight rail schedule. We need grade separation between freight and passenger trains before any regional or national network will ever improve, and amtrak and other agencies like metrolink have no money allocated for this.

okprod 6y ago

Yea the US is far behind other countries with regard to passenger rail service. A friend who thought Amtrak was fast got blown away when she rode the Shinkansen for the first time.

freeopinion 6y ago
Osaka to Tokyo on Shinkansen is ~500km and takes over 3 hours. Los Angeles to Las Vegas on Amtrak is ~500km and takes over 7 hours. Oh, except that you don't finish in Las Vegas. You finish in Kingman, AZ (more that 160km from Las Vegas) because that's as close as you can get with Amtrak. The Shinkansen is travelling through significantly populated areas on the trip. Amtrak is travelling through a barren desert.
- fomine3 6y ago
  Osaka to Tokyo is about 2.5 hours if you use fastest Shinkansen.

nsgi 6y ago

> Also, a nominal hour to cover 93 miles by rail, and just three trains a week, is just laughable. The service frequency is laughable but an hour to cover 93 miles doesn't sound too bad. Plenty of intercity train services in the UK are slower than that. e.g. London Waterloo to Brockenhurst is 92 miles and takes about 1hr30 making three stops

Rapzid 6y ago

The one time I took Empire Builder, from Leavenworth to Seattle, it was 4.5 hours late. Luckily I had decided to spend the day in Seattle before catching my flight..