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.