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Anyone who has ridden Amtrak and had to pull over and weight for a freight train to pass.
by WillPostForFood 4y ago
Anyone who has ridden Amtrak and had to pull over and weight for a freight train to pass.
- thriftwy 4y agoAvoiding that situation has to be Scheduling 101.
- blibble 4y agoisn't it by design, given the freight companies own the railways? in the UK it's the opposite, freight trains get pushed into sidings so passenger trains can overtake (but then they don't get charged for causing delays)
- stetrain 4y agoAmtrak is legally supposed to get priority but I think they can't directly sue the freight railroads for failing to meet this requirement.
- ghaff 4y agoMy understanding is that Amtrak is supposed to get priority if the Amtrak train is on schedule. That is often not the case.
- thriftwy 4y agoI don't understand how a train may not be on schedule. There's two rails on which the train runs in completely deterministic matter, unlike air or car traffic.
- ghaff 4y agoBecause trains get delayed by other trains even though they're not supposed to be, crew are late, there are mechanical issues of some sort, person on the tracks... Most air delays don't have to do with weather or other things in the air. They have to do with things that happen with getting into the air. I take commuter rail every now and then which mostly doesn't compete a lot with freight and delays are, if not super-common, not rare. Amtrak is very possibly worse than other systems in this regard but it's not hard to see how multi-day train trips could accumulate delays when sharing tracks with miles-long freight trains traveling at sometimes very slow speeds.
- thriftwy 4y agoI imagine that locomotives have redundancy of some sort so a single mechanical failure should not cause paralysis. Other than that, having some padding and a schedule should get you two nines. I imagine you have to strech the schedule or skip maintenance to get that sort of cascading failures.
- blibble 4y agohttps://wiki.openraildata.com/index.php/Delay_Attribution_Guide https://wiki.openraildata.com/index.php/Delay_Attribution_Gu...
- kortilla 4y agoThe rails are owned by freight. Scheduling 101 is to optimize their freight throughput.
- frosted-flakes 4y agoAlso, the sidings can't accomodate 100-car freight trains, so Amtrak trains are forced to wait in the siding for the slow freight train to pass.