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Yep. My wife and I took the train from Atlanta to New Orleans once, we spent 50% of our total time waiting in multiple places for freight trains to pass. We go
by sarchertech 1y ago
Yep. My wife and I took the train from Atlanta to New Orleans once, we spent 50% of our total time waiting in multiple places for freight trains to pass.
We got in 4 hours late if I recall and nearly all of that was waiting for freight trains.
- bluGill 1y agoThe freights respond if Amtrack would keep their schedules things would work, but once a train is late they have to do extra work to find places for that train that isn't running schedule. (and one badly maintained local railroad early in the trip is enough to ensure Amtrak is always late) I'm not sure who is right in the above, but it is important to at least consider all sides of the argument.
- sarchertech 1y agoOh yeah I’m sure there’s plenty of blame to go around. But for passenger service, you really can’t have a system where being 5 minutes late compounds into an hour late because then it’s a positive feedback loop and there’s no way to recover.
- bluGill 1y agothat nobody has fixed the problem despite laws and years of talk shows how incompetent management is...
- rsynnott 1y agoIt's probably more a question of _money_, really; you'd need to build, at a minimum, lots of passing loops, and really ideally additional lines. That all costs money.
- bluGill 1y agoAmtrak has been around since the 1970s. Competent management would be asking where the delays are coming from and putting a priority on them and fixing them (note that priority need not be right, only that you are close and do something). While we may still need more passing loops, we should have seen lot built and my now at least some of them would be the needed ones. Amtrak seems to stuck on large projects, so we have shelf's full of plans/studies on new lines, but they are all too big to build and still they keep making more.
- rsynnott 1y agoAmtrak don't actually own the tracks, right? They're not really in a position to fix this sort of problem; that would be on the owners of the tracks, who presumably don't have much incentive to fix it.
- bluGill 1y agoAmtrak owns the tracks in the north east, and hasn't done anything. Even where they don't own tracks, doing a deep dive into the areas where there are problems can find solutions. There are many options to force a private owner to fix problems, and congress can fund part of the cost for a passing track if Amtrak calls it a priority. Or Amtrak and sue the private railroad for not giving them legal priority if that is the real problem. I'm sure there are lots of other options that someone in the railroads would know.