Just recently completed a trip on the Amtrak City of New Orleans, and was wondering if anyone knew why the train would stop each time a train on a parallel track would pass going the opposite direction? Is there some reason two trains can’t pass each other while both are moving at full speed? Or is there another reason?
I just took the California Zephyr from Denver to the Bay Area and back the week of Thanksgiving, and I asked the same question of one of the conductors. Apparently, passenger trains must give way to cargo trains at all times, so the Amtrak train goes onto a secondary track and waits for the cargo train to pass. It’s frustrating to be sure, especially when the train is already late, but, from what the conductor said, there is some amount of time padding built into the schedule to allow for slowdowns and stops when cargo trains will be needing the tracks.
Yeah, we pulled over and stopped about 10 times and were still 30 minutes early.
The reason is the freight railroads own all the tracks that Amtrak uses (except for the Northeast Corridor (except for Metro-North)) and many of those lines do not have two tracks for the whole length. Instead, they have sidings every few dozen miles where one train can pull over while the other one passes in the opposite direction.
No, that’s not true. UP just chooses to be an asshole about it, as most of the way, the tracks belong to them. They just ignore the rules. Passenger trains *supposedly * have priority. This just started to be a real problem recently, with Amtrack now running as much as 4 hours late.
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2006/08/08/MNGGTKD03A1.DTL
"But Alan Miller, also with the Train Riders Association of California, said Union Pacific is failing to uphold an agreement with Amtrak and the federal government to give Amtrak trains priority on the track. This agreement, part of the 1970s negotiations that allowed Union Pacific to discontinue its passenger rail service, requires Union Pacific to give Amtrak trains the right of way.
Because right of way is determined by Union Pacific dispatchers in Omaha, Neb., advocacy groups say there is no way to be sure that Union Pacific actually is giving Amtrak priority over freight.
Passengers who rode the train late last week reported seeing so many freight trains pass them by, they thought the freights had the automatic right of way."
http://www.calrailnews.com/issues.html
"The reasons for the excessive Starlight delays are not hard to find. First, Union Pacific, the owner of the line, provides only one track along the 640-mile section between Portland and Sacramento. It is in this section where many of the worst conflicts and problems occur. Along this section there are frequent scheduling conflicts between the many Union Pacific freight trains using the line and the Starlight trains. This situation is made even worse because Union Pacific?s policy of deferring needed track maintenance, thereby causing safety problems serious enough to require the Federal Railway Administration to impose no less than 100 speed restrictions along the section. Finally, there is the problem of dispatching. The movements of freights and passenger trains along the single track is complicated by many factors including the speed restrictions, Union Pacific yard and marshalling snafus and various priority considerations. For this reason it requires great care and diligence on the part of dispatchers to make certain that conflicts are minimized. Unfortunately the dispatching of the trains that travel along the section between Portland and Sacramento is executed by Union Pacific dispatchers with little apparent interest in passenger rail travel and little concern for the Amtrak patrons riding on Union Pacific tracks. "
I’m just repeating what the conductor told me. We were four hours late on the trip back, though part of that was from leaving an hour and a half late. In the two days in each direction, we never once went first when passing a cargo train - those trains always kept going and we always stopped or slowed.
Maybe UP is supposed to let passenger trains go first, but it doesn’t seem to be actually happening.
So there aren’t any restrictions on trains passing each other at full speed on parallel tracks? I can’t recall it happening on my trip, even though I could have sworn there were times we stopped even though there appeared to be two tracks- I could have been mistaken though.
Chances are they weren’t actually parallel tracks, just side tracks to allow one train to sit or go slowly while the other went on the through track. At least on our route, most of the time there was only one track.
My company runs freight along amtraks northeast corridor and as you would guess, the passenger trains get higher priority. We sometimes have to wait up to 3 hours for amtrak to run us.
On the section of amtrak that I’m qualified on (from philadelphia to perryville MD) trains regularly pass eachother at full speed, but there’s 4 tracks for them to run trains on. I think the only restriction is passing a train that is on an adjacent track while stopped at a passenger station. I guess I should look that one up. 
Yep. The pass. has been “refuged” for the passage of the freighter. “Refuge loops” are of various lengths, and sometimes the distinction is blurred on the longer ones between being a mere loop (not a circular section of track, but a siding with a switch at either end) or actually being a proper bidirectional route.
Generally, the refuge or passing loops are the minimum size required to refuge the longest freight trains, but at half a mile or so in length, even a shorter passenger train is going to have to stop and cool its wings for a little while before “getting the road” at the signal at the far end.
Signalling is a complex business, and although I don’t doubt that the freight companies sometimes fudge things by putting their own trains first, it’s not always possible to put the passenger train ahead of the freighter even if they sincerely want to do it. The freighter might be facing fifty miles of single track after the passing loop, where the passenger train might only be facing ten in the other direction. The signallers might be taking five or ten other trains into account when they decide which of the two to refuge and which one to be given the road.
Just to elaborate a little on what’s already been said (and translate some of what TheLoadedDog said into American railroading terms…)
What you experienced during your trip was probably not true double tracking; it’s fairly rare except for the busiest of corridors. Both UP and BNSF are in the process of multi-year infrastructure upgrades to start, continue, or finish double tracking some of their lines. It’s an expensive proposition, somewhere in the neighborhood of 1 or 2 million bucks per mile last I heard, and that’s just roadbed and track.
Typically, most of the railroad tracks in the country are single track. A great many of them are equipped for bi-directional operation, ie there are signals facing both directions. Every few miles there will be sidings of varying lengths, usually a mile or two long. This allows for opposing meets, which you witnessed on Amtrak, and also for overtaking meets, where a fast train needs to pass a slow train.
Somewhere (for UP it’s Omaha, for KCS it’s Shreveport, etc.) there is a dispatcher (“signaller” in the previous post) sitting at a computer console that displays a subdivision. In my neck of the woods, it’s the UP’s Little Rock sub, stretching from Little Rock, AR to Longview, TX. He’s the air traffic controller of the rails: deciding when trains go, when they stop, in contact via radio. He can see where any train is on his subdivision, all the absolute signals, remote switches, etc. His computer lets him set those signals and switches for trains. In your situation, he’d see your Amtrak train’s icon against a UP train. He will direct the trains to take the siding, hold the main, proceed to XX control point, etc. Essentially, he wants to keep the railroad fluid. Amtrak isn’t generally his highest priority, though it’s mandated to be. Generally, getting his railroad’s cargo to its destination will more than pay the measely fine for keeping the pax train in the hole.
UP is notoriously shitty in dealing with Amtrak. BNSF does better. I think NS does the best. But, as the previous post pointed out, sometimes putting Amtrak in the hole (siding) actually does result in less delays. If your train is the only northbound, facing 10 southbounds, the DS would have to find a place for all 10 of them. That takes time, not only to line all those trains into sidings, but also for them to get there. Meanwhile, the Amtrak train is on the main…but only doing 30 or 40mph because he keeps getting yellow (approach) signals. If the DS puts Amtrak in the hole, allowing the 10 southbounds to keep moving at 55-70mph, they all get past Amtrak and he can open up to 79mph…resulting in a smaller net delay.
Likewise, not all sidings can accomodate all freight trains; some trains are just too long. The DS could set up a zipper meet: the freight (too long for the siding) pulls as far as it can and stops. Amtrak holds the main and stops short of the freight’s ass end, which is hanging out onto the main. The freight then retakes the main, behind the stopped Amtrak train. Amtrak waits for his ass end to clear, then the switch to return, then he can leave. That takes far more time than simply putting Amtrak in the siding and allowing the freight to come on through.
If you’d like to see all this in action (and control it!) there’s a program called “Train Dispatcher” that is pretty close to the real deal. The next-to-last version is free, and has a pretty expansive library of real-world routes one can download and try, likewise free.
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Have the single track lines in the US always been that way or were they once doubled and then been singled as traffic declined? When the fastest/smartest way to travel coast to coast was the train did they all run on single tracks? I remember reading somewhere that railroads in the States were originally built to much lower standards than in the UK to minimise capital investment and maximise early revenue return but I had assumed the infrastucture was rebuilt to a higher standard in the glory days before serious competition from the airlines.
I was wondering if the fact that so many lines are single track, with the resulting conflict between freight and passenger traffic and slower average speeds, partly accounted for the lower use of rail in the US compared to Europe. The topic was discussed in this thread but I don’t remember single tracks being directly proposed as a reason.
If you were to double-track the entirety of the line between, say, Chicago and Los Angeles, you’d be talking adding roughly 2000 miles of track. It’s not quite the same as double-tracking from Manchester to London. 
Another consideration: An Amtrak train will typically have what, a half-dozen cars or so? While most freight trains can have upwards of a hundred. Admittedly, the freights often also have multiple locomotives, but we’re still talking 20 or more cars per loco. And a passenger car is mostly air space, but freight cars are filled to the brim, often with heavy things like coal or ore. So a freight train is going to have much more mass per motive force, and therefore much less acceleration, than a passenger train. So if one train has to stop, wait, and start up again, it makes sense for it to be the much more agile passenger one.
For the most part, the tracks have always been single. I can think of one example ot the contrary, and that’s Horseshoe Curve in Pennsylvania. According to its Wikipedia article (and my vague recollection from Trains magazine) it was widened to 4 tracks at the turn of the century. One was pulled in 1981, and today there are 3. That is an oddball, though. Generally we have single tracks, and as capacity is filled, the ones that really need to be doubled or tripled are done as the capital is available.
When train travel was the cat’s pajamas, it was still mostly on single track. The difference, though, is that each railroad ran its own passenger trains. So UP dispatchers, for example, were routing UP trains over UP tracks. Passenger trains were the railroads’ flagships, so to speak, and they were treated much better than the current Amtrak-running-over-a-third-party system.
It’s difficult to paint the entire US railroad system with one broad stroke, but I’d say you’re mostly correct when you state that the early railroads were built to lower standards in comparison with the UK. A lot of our railroads were just flopped down, in some cases taking some pretty indirect and illogical routes. There were also quite a few railroads that originally laid narrow gauge track and had to come back through and standardize later. The infrastructure has been rebuilt, many times, over the years. 40 lb. rail was replaced by 60, then 90, etc. as the locomotives and freight cars grew in size and mass. Semaphore signals were replaced by searchlights, which are being/have been replaced by tri-lights. Many manual switches have been converted to high-speed automatic/remote switches. Still, until fairly recently there wasn’t much need to double/triple the tracks. The 1970’s were a low point, and lots of people imagined the industry collapsing. However, the past, oh…ten years or so have seen some amazing growth; my latest issue of Trains states that BNSF had a 35% increase in traffic within the past 5 years.
Vis a vis passenger rail here vs. Europe: that’s a complex question. If (big if) the host railroads double/triple tracked all the routes of Amtrak trains, and dispatched Amtrak with priority, would the US experience more passenger train usage? My guess is not. Our national system is just a patchwork, created from the ruins of the old passenger network and slowly pruned for 30 years. If, for example, I wanted to go from here (Northeast Texas) to New Orleans, I’d have to travel to Chicago to do it. Or, travel to San Antonio. Chicago is an overnight trip; San Antone takes about 12 hours on the train. I can drive to New Orleans in 6 hours.
The reality of Amtrak is that it’s just a political hot potato outside of the Northeast Corridor. Can you get from here to there on the train? Yes. Is it a mostly pleasant experience? Yes, if you know what to expect. Is it taken seriously as a mode of transportation? No, not really. It would take serious government involvement, above and beyond the 2 billion dollars or so they pay Amtrak per year, to bring us up to par with Europe. I’m talking something like the Interstate Highway program here…build a railroad for the exclusive use of passenger trains, like the TGV system. But the distances involved and the fact that only 2 trains per day will probably travel it makes it a crappy investment.
If I recall correctly, the engineer and the conductor belong to the host railroad, in this case UP. It would make sense for the conductor to make his company look good. The other employees on the train belong to Amtrak.
The engineer and conductor are both Amtrak employees. They still have to qualify on the subdivision, and that takes a UP pilot engineer, but once the Amtrak guys have qualified, there is no UP employee on the train.
Here is a timely article from today’s San Francisco Chronicle, talking about the success of Amtrak California’s Capitol Corridor trains over the last 15 years, going from 3 daily round-trip trains carrying 273,000 passengers (in 1991) to 1.3 million passengers over the last 12 months on 16 round-trip daily trains:
Up until 2004, the Yolo Causeway across the marshes between Davis and Sacramento had only a single rail track and was a serious bottleneck:
(2003 numbers). That stretch was double-tracked – largely with California state funds – in 2004, and Oakland to Sacramento is now double-track all the way. The stretch between Oakland and San Jose still has large sections of single track, which is why several of the trains use a “bus bridge” between those two cities; the demand is there, but UP just can’t fit the trains in.
Outside of the Northeast Corridor (which is Amtrak-owned multiple-track all the way), it seems that the most successful Amtrak services are ones that have strong state funding: thus, California actively supports the Pacific Surfliner and Capitol Corridor services, which are the second and third most successful Amtrak corridors in the US. Amtrak’s Cascade service in the Pacific Northwest (partially funded by the states of Washington and Oregon) also does pretty well. When such states can see a benefit, they often appear willing to help to upgrade the track, but the true long-distance trains suffer from having too low a ridership to justify the money (a somewhat vicious circle) and travel through several states, which leaves them largely “orphaned” when it comes to state funding.