Ya gotta be rich; it starts at $5/mile & then there are additional charges
And if you think that’s bad, imagine the ones equipped with a minibar…
I’ve asked my son, who works for AMTRAK about the priority question, but he has not replied. In practice the Adirondack is always late. Especially the southbound train because there are always delays at the border. My son is currently engaged in negotiations to have preclearance at the train station, just like at the airport. There already is preclearance in Vancouver, but they stop at the border anyway.
My son finally replied and his answer is worth quoting in full. I am especially appalled by the fact that the freight companies are removing double tracking.
'Regarding Amtrak, in the US we legally have statutory priority over freight trains, so they are supposed to dispatch our trains with higher priority than freight trains. In reality, that isn’t really the way it works, although they do try to move our trains with some level of priority. But they’re not going to delay one of their high priority trains to move an Amtrak train more quickly, and the enforcement actions available are complicated, time consuming, and sometimes politically challenging. So it’s often better to just try to work with the freight railroad to get them to try to improve their performance voluntarily and/or pay for infrastructure improvements that reduce bottlenecks. The other thing that has happened in the last 20 years is the freight railroads switching to something called Precision Scheduled Railroading (which, to paraphrase what my 10th grade history teacher said about the Holy Roman Empire, is neither precise, nor scheduled, nor railroading). This has involved running longer trains while reducing infrastructure (like removing double track and switches), all in the pursuit of a higher operating ratio (i.e., profit). As a result, the freight railroads are now often running very long trains that can’t fit in the small side tracks they still have, so they often have to put the shorter Amtrak trains on the siding to let a long freight train pass, which is obviously not ideal for us. So it’s not a great strategy, although it has made the freight railroads profitable. It also varies by railroads, with CPKC being the best and CN being (by far) the worst, which is particularly galling given all of the money invested by the Canadian government when they were a Crown Corporation. On the other hand, VIA doesn’t even have theoretical priority (nor do we in Canada), so they get really screwed over by CN (and most of their routes run on CN tracks, after the big cuts they did in 1990)."
Thank you for sharing this! It lines up with what I’ve heard and read, but it’s good to hear it from the horse’s mouth.
Yes, thanks, Hari! That really clears some things up.
I’m also a bit shocked at the removal of double trackage - the UP has been trying to double track its Sunset route from El Paso to Southern California for the better part of this century. In a world where you’re competing with the flexibility of truck shipping, it seems counterproductive to eliminate what can improve your operational flexibility for the sake of what seems like little more than an accounting charge rather than a real drain on your resources.
Yeah, I can maybe see wanting to install new rails as single-track, so you can use a narrower right-of-way and don’t need to lay down as much steel… but converting existing double track to single means a lot of work to pull up the steel before you can sell it, and leaves you with a narrow strip of land that can’t really be sold for any other purpose.
I’m similarly puzzled when people talk about the “last mile” problem in rail, because that used to be a solved problem: Industry lined the sides of the railroad tracks, and every facility had a siding running off to it. And all the rail companies had to do to keep that was to just not get rid of it.
They don’t want to extend the double track and they want to make trains longer.
In the UK, we use a system of Regulation and Delay Attribution. If an incident delays a train, that incident is the root cause; if the delayed train delays other trains, then the incident is blamed for those delays too, and the entity that caused the delay may need to pay a penalty. Acts of God are largely exempt, unless the train or rail operating company have failed to take appropriate precautions.
. By regulating the trains concerned, a slow train might be allowed to go in front of a faster (but delayed) train, thereby allowing the delay to the slow train to be mitigated.
But this slow train might end up delaying the delayed fast train even further, and that means the operators of the slow train might need to pay a penalty to the operators of the fast train.
The Delay Attribution Board examines these delays, and shuffles money around accordingly. Here are the rules; good luck in understanding them. Delay Attribution Board - Network Rail
That is legitimately fascinating.
So acts of God such as “the wrong kind of snow” or “leaves on the tracks” are OK. 
The tension between freight and passenger services is as old as rail. The two don’t ever coexist well. The counterpoint to worrying about passenger traffic is the economic value of a healthy freight system. Moving freight about with trucks is not a great answer, and if you can get a rail freight system properly operating, it can be a significant win. Sadly there is a lot of political baggage associated with support for rail. Much of which makes no sense in the modern world.
Europe does passenger trains really well. But they don’t do freight well at all. The UK has its usual class system embedded in the fabric of rail. Just the numbering system used for trains tells you everything you need to know. (Low numbered trains are express passenger trains radiating from London. Freight is at the opposite end.)
A huge problem many freight rail operators have is that they compete without the embedded subsidies road freight carriers have for infrastructure.
Don’t the railroads have significant subsidies in the land grants that they still utilize?
Sure, but the government didn’t build the rails themselves.
An industry-adjacent person (I forget who) observed that in Europe railroads were built to move people but in the US they were built to move freight. They laugh at our passenger service and, outside the Northeast Corridor, are right to do so but the US railroads move six times as much freight as does the EU.
In the 1880s when railroads had a transportation monopoly* and the ICC was getting off of the ground the commission basically said railroads carry two kinds of freight, heavy, cheap raw materials like wheat and iron ore, and light-weight, expensive manufactured goods like shoes and furniture. Therefore we will set rates low, barely making a profit, on the former and higher on the latter to make up for it.
Things went well for a while then starting in the 1920s the road networks in the US were vastly improved and especially after WWII truck companies siphoned off the manufactured goods leaving railroads with with the cheap, low-paying stuff. This set them back on their heels and in the '60s and '70s there were an awful lot of consolidations and bankruptcies as the number of class-one railroads went from 30-something to six, the non-Canadian ones mentioned in Kenobi’s #2 post abive plus Kansas City Southern (merged with Canadian Pacific three years ago) and Amtrak.
Since then the rise of intermodal freight – bringing back the manufactured goods – deregulation, and frankly, squeezing the hell out of their remaining workforce, the big ones and most of the regionals are profitable again.
*Read The Octopus for a fictionalized version of the Southern Pacific vs. farmers.
Japan railroads were also built to move passengers and not freight. Only about 5% of freight, when measured on a ton-kilometer basis, goes by train. About half is by truck and 45% by sea.
JR Freight has to negotiate use of train lines, and 90% of operations happen at night. In crowded cities, there just aren’t any time slots available for freight during the day.
Japan has been trying to find ways to increase the amount shipped by rail, but has run into difficulties. It’s still an ongoing problem.
I kind of had that impression but was too lazy to make sure before I posted. I’ve never seen any YT videos of Japanese freight trains, just passenger from a dinky rail bus on a branch line to nowhere to one high speed or another.
Given that Japan is long skinny islands, no point in the country is very far from the sea, so that makes sense. Ships are by far the cheapest way to transport cargo, if you’re patient and have a conveniently-placed ocean between your endpoints.
I’ve seen more freight trains here in Hokkaido in the three years I’ve lived here than I saw in Tokyo in the 20+ years there.
Freight is offloaded at the port in Hakokate then shipped by train to Sapporo, taken directly by train or by truck on a ferry.
There is a proposal to make a bullet train for freight that would run at night.
No place in Japan is more than 120 km from the sea.
There are only a couple of major cities that are more than 30 km inland.
The now retired E3 Shinkasen was supposed to have been converted into a freight train and be running by now. That appears to be directed at fast distribution of high value perishables. You won’t be shlepping truckloads of cement or pig iron in that.
One suspects a difficulty in making Japanese freight trains work well is managing the last mile problems. It isn’t easy for any freight system, and shoe horning this into a highly optimised passenger network laid out to connect inner city destinations won’t be easy. In the modern world freight is either bulk goods or containers. Both require dedicated handling systems at each end. Wrangling the consist of freight trains is also something that usually needs dedicated marshalling facilities.
One obstacle to high-speed freight rail would be that high-speed trains need to be streamlined, while freight is usually based on boxy containers that can be easily lifted onto or off of a flatbed.