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Amtrak asks fed regulators to investigate Union Pacific handling of Sunset Ltd
- bmc7505 4y agoAs a frequent Amtrak passenger, I can attest to the unpunctuality of the Union Pacific and other freight operators. On several occasions we have been delayed by a passing freight train that was an hour or more behind schedule, causing us to miss our scheduled connection. During one such occasion, while traveling on the Coast Starlight from Eugene this summer, I was treated very rudely by the conductor, who kicked me out of the dining car despite having a reservation. Precision scheduled railroading is anything but precise.
- nopenopenopeno 4y agoThe real problem here is that freight trains have so much priority in the US, unlike every other major country in the world. It doesn't matter how many or what kinds of trains we have. This sort of policy will always makes trains an unreliable and therefore impractical mode of transportation. And this is a major reason for the US leading the world in carbon consumption per capita.
- vinay427 4y agoNit: I couldn’t find a source that indicated the US leads in carbon consumption per capita, although it is near the top. For instance: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/consumption-co2-per-capita?tab=table https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/consumption-co2-per-capit... More to the point, as several other comments noted the official policy is to prioritize passenger rail, which clearly wasn’t happening, so hopefully events such as these will begin to change that.
- nopenopenopeno 4y ago>the official policy is to prioritize passenger rail Define "official" >hopefully events such as these will begin to change that. What events? If you think this was a rare case, you obviously don't ride Amtrak long distance much. Most interstate Amtrak trips get delayed by freight, and it has been that way for decades.
- bobthepanda 4y agoThe official policy, in that it is literally US law. The subject of the article is an attempt to enforce said provisions.
- nopenopenopeno 4y agoSure, but there is no precedent for such regulation as long as the railroads are privately owned by the same corporations that control congress. This is yet another case of HN Utopianism.
- stonogo 4y agoWhy would there need to be a precedent? The regulation has been in place for forty-five years. It's the law. Congress passed it. The only new aspect is that Amtrak can now request these investigations, where previously it was the sole purview of the Department of Justice, an organization famously known for not being Congress.
- b3morales 4y agoThey only have de facto priority; officially passenger trains are supposed to be prioritized. This is in fact the basis of the complaint described in the article.
- nopenopenopeno 4y agoThat is just plain wrong. In practice, of the 30+ interstate Amtrak trips I've taken in the past 10 years, the overwhelming majority of them are delayed by freight rail. It is standard operating procedure.
- CrazyStat 4y agoYes, that's what de facto priority means. Since the railroads operate the lines and the freight trains, they (illegally) give their own freight trains priority over Amtrak passenger trains, which by law are supposed to have priority.
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- nopenopenopeno 4y agoThat is not what de facto means, but regardless what is the point in even mentioning it if it were?
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- stonogo 4y agoIt's actually exactly what de facto means. Amtrak has de jure priority, but freight has de facto priority, because the freight carriers are gaming the system by running over-long trains and other assorted foot-dragging with respect to compliance.
- mlindner 4y agoThis isn't true. Amtrak has priority by law over freight in the US as long as they are on time. They don't get priority once they area late. What happens is that Amtrak becomes late and then they lose their slot and become further late.
- stetrain 4y agoBut as far as I know there is no enforcement action taken when the freight railroads violate that priority.
- bastawhiz 4y agoWhat happens when late freight makes Amtrak late? You can't just make a freight train evaporate from the track because Amtrak has priority.
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- nopenopenopeno 4y agoYou can make the freight train wait at the merge. It's not rocket science.
- bastawhiz 4y agoFreight trains can be very long. If it's already occupying the track, it's too late to make it wait.
- crote 4y agoThe problem is that freight transporters are intentionally running trains which are longer than the sidings. Even if an Amtrak train has priority by law, it is - by design - impossible for the freight train to pull over. The result is that an on-time Amtrak train has to wait for a delayed freight train, because it is physically impossible to do anything else. This of course results in the Amtrak train now being late, through no fault of its own.
- bobthepanda 4y agoHonestly we need to build parallel rights of way anyways. The freight rails are slow and dilapidated. It would make more sense for passenger railways to be separated from freight railways entirely rather than to try and squeeze into inadequate trackage. We don’t try to unload air freight through passenger terminals or vice versa.
- nopenopenopeno 4y agoGood luck with that. The only thing we've been able to do in the last few decades is close railways altogether.
- smadge 4y agoThat makes sense on some corridors but I'm not sure about the economics of building 2000 miles of dedicated right of way for a train that runs 3 times a week. Maybe if price, reliability, and speed of the service improved to such a degree it could feasibly compete with air and highway travel between those cities.
- ThunderSizzle 4y agoChicken and egg. Running 3 times a week slowly and expensively isn't going to increase ridership.
- bobthepanda 4y agoThe good news is that most of the population lives in corridors that would make sense. The I-5 coast and everything west of I-35 represents most of the US population. In particular, Chicago, Atlanta, and New York form a triangle roughly 700 miles on each side. This is roughly the distance between Beijing and Shanghai, or Tokyo to Fukuoka, both of which see high speed trains regularly making the full journey.
- thatguy0900 4y agoThe government frankly doesn't have it in it to do a project like that anymore. Can you imagine the outcry when they have to eminent domain some poor peoples property?
- ericd 4y agoHaha wow, like 30% more passengers who are 3+ hours late than are on time (11k 3+ hours late vs. 8k on time). That's impressively bad. In aggregate, 4x as many passengers late as on time.
- mlindner 4y agoThe solution to fixing problems with Amtrak is to privatize it and shut down the unprofitable long distance lines or require states that want them to pay for them. Amtrak is already profitable in areas of high density if they weren't held back by all the unprofitable lines.
- thfuran 4y agoShould we shut down all the unprofitable highways too?
- coryrc 4y agoYes, we have far too many.
- thfuran 4y agoWhat about unprofitable fire departments?
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- coryrc 4y agoDo they cause urban heat effect, break apart communities, and make it unsafe to walk places?
- 0xy 4y agoBy some estimates, a firefighter costs $120,000 in yearly costs while saving over $500,000 in damages a year. It's a lot harder to make the ROI claim for highways and roads, especially considering increasing road capacity does not decrease congestion -- added capacity tends to increase demand by over 100% of the difference, as little as 5 years later.
- mlindner 4y agoThe federal highway system funding originated as a method of defense. Unless the military switches to using rail for transport then throwing highway funding into the military budget seems fine to me.
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- readthenotes1 4y agoI have taken one round trip train journey in the last 30 years. The outbound trip made me late for my daughter's wedding because Union Pacific swung so many freight trains in our path that we were 3 hours late
- SoftTalker 4y agoWhy doesn't Amtrak simply pay UP adequately to get priority? UP is prioritizing freight because it pays better. Fix that.
- pengaru 4y ago> Why doesn't Amtrak simply pay UP adequately to get priority? UP is prioritizing freight because it pays better. Fix that. Is it really that simple? Freight trains are _long_, Amtrak passenger trains are relatively short. It's far easier to sideline an Amtrak train to let a multi-mile-long freight train pass than it is to sideline that same freight train for Amtrak to pass. It's not my area of expertise at all, but I assume there aren't huge quantities of such long parallel rails scattered throughout the network for freight trains to move over and wait.
- rsj_hn 4y agoTo put thing in perspective, US rail moves: 61 tons of freight per American each year 94 tons of freight per mile for each passenger-mile on rail 1/3 of all export goods move by rail 1.7 trillion ton-miles of freight 40% of US long distance freight by volume uses rail So you have a problem in that increasing the costs to freight will affect all Americans in making them pay more for goods, whereas it will only benefit those passengers using rail. So politically, this is a tough sell. I think you need to put down dedicated track for passenger rail if you want it to be prioritized in our existing rail system, as it's currently a rounding error compared to freight. That said, I think you will find that there are transportation corridors where there is the political will to fund laying down dedicated track for passenger rail. The way to think about it is that rail maybe costs $X per mile of track, but provides 100000X benefit for freight, and maybe 10x benefit for passenger traffic, so while you would never prioritize passenger traffic over freight, or even treat them equally, it still makes sense to build dedicated tracks for passenger rail.
- ddevault 4y agoThese numbers are similarly misleading. Read up on induced demand. Rail passengers in the US are small in number because passenger rail sucks. If it were improved, ridership would go up.
- woodruffw 4y agoThe history of the US's Western freight lines is fascinating (and frustrating): we've allowed these massive companies (UP, BNSF) to extract rent for well over a century, in exchange for having laid down the original lines (which, mind you, were also paid for in land and bonds[1]). [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pacific_Railroad_Acts https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pacific_Railroad_Acts
- IIAOPSW 4y agoIts long and complicated. Amtrak exists in the first place because once upon a time these freight operators were also the passenger operators. While today they look like "extracting rent", once upon a time they were forced by regulation to carry the burden of passenger service. The situation with Amtrak was basically the government agreeing to take over that before it killed the companies, but Amtrak would retain certain rights to demand the use of rail lines which an otherwise private operator might not be able to successfully negotiate over. But its more complicated than that even. Because passenger rail was dying in the first place due to the massive subsidy the government gave to competing modes of transit in the form of the interstate highway act and later the subsidized construction of airports. So yeah, Railroads were supported by the government to begin with, but live by the subsidy die by the subsidy. So really the history of railroads isn't at all a clear cut line between private and public interest. The current "massive companies" are a shadow of what they once were. Pennsylvania RR used to have a higher annual revenue than the Federal Government itself. New York Central wasn't far behind. By the 50s, these titans were in such decline they were forced to merge into "Penn Central". By the 60s, Penn Central was dead. Could you imagine Amazon having to merge with Walmart to survive by the 2030s, and going bankrupt anyway by the 2040s? This was more extreme than that.
- woodruffw 4y agoThis is all important context, and I thank you for including it. I agree it's not as clear cut as "public versus private." But there's a recurring theme here: public money enabling private growth, followed by public money softening private decline. Railroads are just one instantiation of this pattern: it shows up in agriculture, industrial manufacturing, medical and materials research, &c. At some point, it should make us stop and think about why we're transferring public money to private institutions and also paying for their mistakes, rather than just having the public institutions do the work themselves. One wonders what the US's rail infrastructure would look like had the US Government bought (and continued to operate) it outright, rather than merely socializing the losses in passenger sales.
- MarkusWandel 4y agoI'm surprised PSR hasn't been mentioned in this. "Precision Scheduled Railroading" primarily means miles-long trains (with locomotives embedded rather than all at the lead end). They can take 10+ minutes to pass at a crossing, which is bad enough, but absent full double tracking, they also don't fit on the passing sidings, so while a passenger train could wait on one to let the freight train pass, the opposite is not possible.
- woodruffw 4y agoIt is mentioned! > On the latter point, it asks the board to look at such matters as “how UP has reconciled its decision to implement Precision Scheduled Railroading with its obligations to host intercity passenger trains over the UP network.” It suggests that the board split its proceeding into two phases — an investigative phase to determine the cause of delays, and whether they are due to a failure to provide preference to Amtrak, and a remedial phase to determine possible damages and corrective action. It also offers a broad range of procedural suggestions regarding documents and interviews that should be part of the proceeding.