My understanding, from 15 or 20 years ago, when I was more of a train hobbyist, is that this isn’t necessarily the case.
In the US, most passenger trains (be they short-haul commuter trains, or long-distance Amtrak trains) are running on rails owned by freight railroads, and are subject to the dispatching systems of those railroads.
While, in theory, passenger trains run at a higher priority, in practice, the railroads will often prioritize their own freight trains (on which the railroads are making more money than the utilization fee that they’re getting from Amtrak or the commuter agencies), and bump the passenger trains down the list.
This is a big part of why, while Amtrak trains have published schedules, it’s very common for them to run late.
A Washington Post article, discussing the Amtrak problem:
“Eight of the 33 routes, including most of the long-distance cross-country lines, experienced on-time arrivals less than 50 percent of the time over the past 12 months. The Empire Builder, running from Chicago to Washington, ran on time only 21 percent of the time in the past year. Only one in three California Zephyr trains made their trips between Chicago and San Francisco on time.”
This is what I was told the last time I rode Amtrak: As long as it’s running on time, the passenger train gets priority. However, once the Amtrak train falls behind schedule, freight trains regain priority and the Amtrak has to work around them. This can cause a delay to grow from half an hour to six hours very quickly.
Yes, subject to limits. You can only add so many cars before you need to add another engine, too. Also, many locations have length limits on trains on that trackage.
Dispatching trains is a somewhat complicated thing. For a given route, say from Toledo to Chicago, train length is limited by siding length or distance between crossovers, so trains can get by each other. For the same route, power (locomotives) is assigned as so many horsepower per ton of train weight. Since we here live in a drained swamp, it is really FLAT, the horsepower requirement is pretty light, could be as little as 2 hp/ton for freight that is not in a hurry. A train could also be power limited, you would not see more than 4 or 5 locomotives on a train. If there were, say, eight for a really heavy train, the connections between the cars would fail. The force needed to pull a 200 car train would exceed the tensile strength of the draft gear (which connects the couplers to the cars.) In hilly country, the trains would end up shorter (I see 150+ cars all the time), at 12 hp/ton, the train would have to stay much shorter to keep pulling force within the strength of the equipment. There’s more to it than that, but that’s the basics.
Engine blocks, transmission housings, frames, driveline and suspension components, flywheels, most gears. There are quite a few cast/extruded components in cars.
I worked at a paper mill, sometimes as a relief rail co-ordinator. Our train had a fixed arrival and departure time. While the rail into the mill was private, the rest of the journey was along the public rail network and so it had scheduled times to ensure it didn’t interfere with the public transport system. The train was a fixed length - IIRC, it held a maximum of 22 export containers or 44 domestic containers. The train would bring in empty shipping containers in the morning and leave with full ones in the evening. We could send it either direction partially empty, but we couldn’t add extra carriages to send more product out. In extreme cases, like where an urgent product was made close to shipping cut off and couldn’t be accommodated on the train, we would despatch by road. That was rare.
Are there actually “empty” freight trains? I thought the supply of available freight cars and the demand for transportation pretty much eliminated that possibility. In other words, if the railroad company makes a delivery from point A to point B, won’t there pretty much always be someone who wants to have something transported from point B to point A?
A lot of freight is commodities that only really move in one direction. Coal, for instance. If a mine sends out a hundred cars full of coal, those cars will have to be returned empty at some point, since you wouldn’t send coal to a coal mine.
http://www.artc.com.au/customers/operations/mtp/2016-03-06/
Due to the length of the trip, I guess they came under a fatigue control (crew too sleepy) label and had to show they were trying to do something.
Of course, if they leave early or late, then they had a good reason to do so
The timetable also establishes an order of priorities…
If the train is late because of the train or the freight company, then it loses its spot.
if the train network causes delays, and a question of “who is first” has to be made, then the timetable is the established order they should have gone through.
The one which has been delayed the most gets through first. However it also means that gov officials can find trains to inspect the crew dairies… If they are half way along, and five hours late, have they had enough rest ?
Union Pacific at one point had more empty container strings than they could store in the yards or on sidings (this was in the Southwest). They actually would tag them onto another train and send them “away” to relieve crowding. This from a friend who worked for UP. :eek:
True. The railroads do try to find cargo to haul in those cars, but there isn’t much out there.
For example, Burlington Northern hauls full trainloads of coal from Powder River in Wyoming east (mostly to Detroit Edison) – usually 3-4 full trains in route at any one time. Mostly they are empty going back to Wyoming, because they can’t find much cargo that can be hauled in hopper cars that are very dirty with coal dust. and unload via dumping out the bottom.
For a while they hauled garbage from eastern cities to dumps in the west/midwest. They offered freight rates low enough, and dump rates were low enough out west compared to in eastern cities, that garbage haulers found this attractive. And nobody cared if the garbage got coal dust on it.
They also looked at hauling grain in those hopper cars, but mostly grain was traveling in other directions, and contamination with coal dust was a big issue.
So in the end, it’s common for those coal trains to go back west empty.
Same with auto carriers. They haul new cars from factories where they are built (Detroit, Tennessee, California) to car dealers all over the country. But there is not much return traffic in autos. And those railroad cars are pretty specialized, it’s hard to use them for other freight. So they too often return empty.
Off-topic, but there was a terrible accident today as two freight trains collided head-on in west Texas. There was a crew of two on each train; one person jumped to safety, but the other three are still missing amid the wreckage.
As sort of an anti-schedule, when they were debating allowing the Canadian Northern trains to roll through here, one of the conditions was black-out periods during the day when they wouldn’t be allowed. Namely so morning/afternoon traffic wouldn’t be snarled up by a mile-long freight train trundling through town.
So I guess everyone has to work around restrictions like that.
When things are transported in intermodal containers, sometimes the containers just get recycled at the end of their route instead of shipped back to refill.
