Amtrak says[1] that while they technically have priority, they have no power to enforce it (and the DoJ isn’t doing anything about the problem); so the best they can do is write an irritated-sounding PDF[2]. I think they’d like you to call your representative and ask them to get this fixed.

[1] https://www.amtrak.com/on-time-performance

[2] https://www.amtrak.com/content/dam/projects/dotcom/english/p...

> I think they’d like you to call your representative

The problem is that nobody in 45 of the 50 states cares about Amtrak.

I want to care about Amtrak but the prices are astronomical. More than flying in an airplane! More than driving a car. Slower than both by far.

In the NE corridor, Amtrak (as bad as it is) is the fastest means of transport from city center to city center. A car is close but just getting into NYC is so slow that Amtrak will win in almost every case.

If for some reason you wanted to go from the DC suburbs of Virginia to Queens a plane might be okay, but realistically planes waste so much time on security and boarding that it’s not worth it.

>A car is close but just getting into NYC is so slow that Amtrak will win in almost every case.

I take Amtrak into NY even though it's basically an hour in the wrong direction to drive to Route 128 station (a suburban station south of Boston). But I do it because I find driving into Manhattan so unpleasant in spite of probably being a bit faster.

Trains vs. planes make sense for the two ends of the Northeast Corridor especially if you're going downtown to downtown. They really don't on a price or time basis for the whole route.

Train is often more expensive than budget airlines in Europe too. (And the Shinkansen in Japan isn't cheap either.) Long distance train can be a comfortable way to travel but economy (and, often, speed) aren't really why you choose long distance rail much of the time.

And the second of those are mostly more served by buses.

There are probably a few city pairs here and there like maybe Seattle and Portland. But Amtrak mostly has utility for the two halves of the Northeast Corridor where it actually has quite a bit of utility. (The whole Boston to DC run is mostly too long relative to flying.)

> Under US law, if Amtrak runs a train on freight rail networks, Amtrak gets priority. In reality, freight operators tell Amtrak to go fuck themselves and Amtrak duly complies.

It’s a bit more complex than that. All train journeys are scheduled ahead of time down to the block level, to ensure that only one train will ever occupy any given block at any given time. During this scheduling process conflicts are inevitable. Each conflict must be resolved somehow, and usually it is done by having one train wait in a siding for the other to depart the conflicted block. If one of these trains is a passenger train, then the law requires that the passenger train must always be given priority. This means that the other train must enter the siding and stop while the passenger train passes.

The freight companies always follow this rule, except for one tiny exception.

Consider what happens when one of the two trains cannot fit into any of the sidings. It wouldn’t do any good for that train to enter a siding and stop, because the back of the train would still be occupying the main line. Instead, the short train must use a siding and allow the longer one to pass.

Back in the 70s when Amtrak was founded and the law was written there just weren’t any long trains. But long trains are definitely more efficient, especially when they only have one type of cargo and all the cars are going to the same place. For one thing, the short trains need a lot more conductors and engineers than the single long train does.

So you can see that when an Amtrak train conflicts with a 2–mile–long coal train, it will definitely be the Amtrak train that ends up waiting. However, this does not _delay_ the Amtrak train, because it is built into the schedule. The Amtrak train has a published arrival time, and getting there on time assumes that it will be stopped for a certain amount of time waiting for that long train to pass.

There are people who think that the freight companies are breaking the law here, but the core fact is that the law simply doesn’t say anything about it; it simply assumes that either train could wait in the siding for the other. I believe it’s been brought up in Congress even, but there’s not been enough political will to amend the law; certainly Congress could ban long trains, or require the track owner to build sidings long enough to accommodate them, etc.

There is also the issue that a _late_ train loses priority. If an Amtrak train departs late (or is delayed during the trip somehow), then it could end up waiting on trains that it was originally scheduled to go ahead of, and this can make it later.

Funny story time: I was taking a trip on the Zephyr. We were delayed for ~20 minutes shortly after leaving Denver because the train ran over a shopping cart. The conductor got on the intercom and apologized for the delay, but of course they had to dig the remains of the cart out from under the engines and inspect them for damage. The train had been on time up til that point; they made up some time during the night, but we were still late getting in to Chicago. Fun times!

> But long trains are definitely more efficient, especially when they only have one type of cargo and all the cars are going to the same place. For one thing, the short trains need a lot more conductors and engineers than the single long train does.

I’ll believe this when I see a real analysis, and only when I see a real analysis.

A long train is huge, and revenue per long train net of fuel seems likely to be quite high. Notably, I expect it to be dramatically higher than the cost of even the number of conductors and engineers needed to run several short trains. (Conductors and engineers are not well paid.)

The tradeoff is that a long train fails if any of the cars fails, so the actual availability of a long train falls exponentially with length. (Which is “mitigated” by what appear to be rather poor, perhaps intentionally poor, inspection practices on the parts of the rail companies, thus allowing long trains with malfunctioning cars to continue to operate.)

I would expect shorter trains to be more economical with all costs considered, especially if signaling and safety systems were upgraded to allow more efficient scheduling.

They’ve been doing really long trains for a couple of decades now, and they’re not showing any signs of stopping. I’d say that the economics of it probably works out.

Anyway, the economics don’t really matter. The long trains exist and have to be scheduled somehow.

I wonder how much it would cost to add extra tracks in places like the Seattle -> Eugene line (that I recently took, except that the trip back turned into a bus due to ... well, freight I think). It's mostly emptiness, my understanding is that actually laying the track isn't hard.

But the more I think about other rail networks, the more I feel like I almost never see multi-track lines. I think these lines are also being used for freight and yet... is the US really just running uniquely long trains for freight?

> is the US really just running uniquely long trains for freight

Yes. By a large margin.