In real life freight trains have the right of way in the U.S.
In other words, the Dollywood Express would be a lot less fun if it spent half the day waiting while trolls unload corndogs from two-person handcars randomly distributed along the track.
The US should really nationalize their rail infrastructure; only the rails themselves, not the railroad companies. The railroads should be treated as transportation infrastructure the same way that the highway system is.
With nationalized rails, the US could set standards for rail-sharing which could help passenger rail and invest in improved rail connections between cities which would improve both freight and passenger rail service.
Currently, each railroad company gets to maintain their own little fiefdoms in certain parts of the US
Sadly true even though legally it's supposed to be the opposite. [0] It's just not enforced at all and as a result of that (and freight trains becoming massive monsters that can't even fit on the passing sidings designed for them) Amtrak service sucks.
Amtrak RoW is part of the deal for the land they received (and the help they get breaking potential labor strikes). They got to drop their intercity service to Amtrak for considerations like the Amtrak right of way too they didn't get nothing out of the deal.
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.
The 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.
Oh 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.
It'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.
Amtrak 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.
Amtrak 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.
Amtrak 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.
When they started getting rid of passenger service had a lot less to do with losing ridership and money and lot more that cargo contracts paid a lot more and with a lot more regularity. The "Robber Barons" get that nickname for a lot of reasons, but one of them was using public land and eminent domain tactics under the "public utility" excuse of providing passenger service for a time for an area, while negotiating for the shortest possible passenger service requirements and the least possible public oversight of their use of once public land, because they knew all along the real, big money was in cargo. A lot of passenger services ended to the day of passenger service requirements contracts ending, even if they were profitable and had high ridership.
The scam was in from the beginning. The car helped exacerbate the problem and the train companies made big fusses about all the lost ridership to the car, as things went along, but even at the beginning a lot of the US rail companies were built on the knowledge that cargo was lucrative and passenger travel the necessary trojan horse to pickup land for cheap.
I kinda doubt that the RR's - especially the long-established ones of the north-east - would have spent the vast sums on opulent passenger terminals, fast luxury trains, and high-density passenger service if passenger service was merely a legal necessity for their freight businesses.
Flip-side, I have heard that the phase-out RMS ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Railway_Mail_Service ) cut the RR's passenger train revenue by about 1/3. Few business models can survive a 1/3 revenue cut.
BTW - at the high end, airplanes were at least as damaging (to passenger rail) as cars.
> I kinda doubt that the RR's - especially the long-established ones of the north-east
I was talking most specifically about the early "oil rush" ones in a lot of "rollover country" (or yes, "flyover country" being the modern term because indeed, air travel also disrupted train travel a lot) that didn't live long enough to be long-established, in the North-East, or bother much at all with opulent terminals and luxury cars. Many of those companies really did exist just long enough for eminent domain to do its job and launder public lands into private hands that cared a lot more about cargo contracts than any of the places the trains stopped along the way.
Most of those rail company names are also kind of lost to time, too, and the tracks are owned by cargo-oriented mega-conglomerates like CSX today. Not to pick on any one in particular by naming names, but also the easiest one to anecdotally name because it owns the dilapidated station I regularly walk past that is today an awful, unsafe shelter for the unhoused that sometimes cargo trains sit on top of for hours at a time, and wasn't particularly "opulent" (outdoor and entirely exposed to the elements) even during the exactly 10 years it operated as a passenger station. (It closed to passenger travel before both most highways had been built and air travel became common, weird huh? Surely just a coincidence that 10 years was the required passenger contract by the eminent domain seizures that opened the land for rail development?)
In other words, the Dollywood Express would be a lot less fun if it spent half the day waiting while trolls unload corndogs from two-person handcars randomly distributed along the track.