While railroads carry a lot of raw materials, like hoppers loaded with styrene pellets and tank car after tank car with ethanol, fully 80% of the trains I watch passing Flagstaff are containers or trailers on flatcars. Those carrying consumer goods must approach 100%, especially those belonging to Amazon or UPS.
Railroads aren’t delivering to your store or doorstep but the bulk of the mileage is theirs.
Disclaimer: this is mostly based on information received.
The Railroads currently operate under a concept called precision scheduled railroading. It’s a massive subject that I don’t claim to fully understand, but if I had to summarize in a few words, then I would call it “Utilization above all else”. Consolidate as much as possible into a few massive trains that run frequently and slash the fringes and specializations that don’t produce enough freight to run frequently. This can be measured by a great operating ratio, retiring lots of locomotives and laying off lots of workers.
In theory your remaining workers are very productive. However, this has been taken to a level where the companies see the workers as robots who sit in a shed until needed. Since there’s no resilience, many drivers frequently get called out to the middle of nowhere to take over a train sitting in a siding for most of their shift or can’t arrange for time off since there’s not enough replacement staff. The other workers are expected to maintain larger territories or inspect faster. This is why offers of higher pay have not worked - the quality of life on the job simply can’t be sustained.
BNSF in particular produced a punitive attendance policy where workers couldn’t organize leave due to the lack of staff and then accumulated demerits if they couldn’t answer on calls due to legitimate outside of work reasons.
In terms of affecting Amtrak services, many of these large trains no long fit in passing sidings. So if their crew times out on the line or they don’t make it to a yard in time due to a strike, they will block the line.
And, in addition, as the Trains article I quoted above notes, if some of the freight unions go on strike, most of the long-distance Amtrak lines will likely be shut down, too, as other unions will likely refuse to cross the picket lines. As most of Amtrak’s routes (outside of the Northeast Corridor) run on tracks that are owned and operated by the freight railroads, that’ll mean that operation on those tracks likely won’t be possible, even if the tracks themselves aren’t blocked by those long trains.
Not just the long-distance lines, but also the regional lines, and Amtrak’s connecting bus services, would be impacted.
I’m scheduled to take the Coast Starlight this coming Saturday. Thank goodness, it looks like any strike would be after that date.
That line is known as the Transcon, its main role is to haul containers to and from the port in the LA area, which is the busiest container port in the US, to and from the Chicago area.
Yes, it’s one of three, the other two in the west being the Northern Transcon, from Seattle to Chicago and the Southern Transcon, from Los Angeles to New Orleans. There is a fourth mainline from Oakland to Chicago but it has no name I am aware of.
The point remains, railroads haul a lot of consumer goods, not just raw materials.