It's not an enforcement issue so much as it is a heavily exploited loophole. Part of the reason freight trains are so long is so that they can't fit in passing sidings. Since Amtrak does fit, they end up having to yield because the freight trains simply cannot.
Could this be fixed by legislation on max train length to ensure all trains fit in sidings? Yes. Will that legislation get passed? No.
This is correct but needs more explanation. What the commenter is alluding to is Precision Scheduled Railraoding ("PSR") [1]. Basically this means having really long trains with half the crew and cutting down on safety inspections to increase profits by spending more time delivering freight. It also gets around the Amtrak priority. Why fewer staff? Because you only need one engine crew for a train twice as long.
Increasing train length on tracks not designed for it is a safety issue. Think about it, you have a whole bunch of separate carriages. Some are turning because that's wher they are on the track. Others are going uphills, yet others downhill. All of these forces become a problem that arguably increases the likelihood of derailment, the kind of which we had in East Palestine, Ohio a few years ago.
The labor situation is so bad that there was the threat of a strike in the Biden administration. For what? Paid sick leave, mainly. Biden got Congress to use their powers to end a strike by "essential" workers and then quietly later went and partially conceded to their demands.
Retiring crews haven't been replaced so the labor is at dire levels, all to slightly increase profits. It was estimated that if UP conceded toa ll the union's demands it would reduce their profit by 6%. Not revenue, profit.
Having a enforced max length on any route especially those with commuter service is not a bad idea, it is the tendency of freight to scale up the number of cars as much as possible for efficiency, passenger services work better shorter with more frequent services.
Yes there are myriad other reasons Amtrak gets delayed, it is not like this is the only bottleneck they have, but that doesn't mean this is not also a key problem.
No idea how true/false the comments are, but one reason to lie would be to scapegoat someone else for Amtrak's problems. If an airline's flights were regularly delayed by 6-24 hours, they'd go out of business
I don't think anyone is outright lying. I think they are just not telling the full story. What that full story is though I have no idea, nor do I have any way to figure it out. (Any investigative reporters want to spend a year or two tracking this down? Beware that there probably isn't enough interest to pay for the time you spend)
From what people in the industry have told me, freight train management is no less scummy than any other kind of freight transportation management, and they continually make trains longer and longer despite nearly everyone’s objections. Some are miles long so there’s no way engineers can see the front of the train even with a gentle curve, and they’re taking hazardous cargo through populated areas.
Wasn't there a big train crash with hazardous materials on an understaffed train a few years ago? And a strike for more sensible working conditions that was struck down by Congress?
I love that the US moves so much freight by train rather than truck, but everything I hear about how trains are run in the US sounds terrible.
The infrastructure is horrifying and the railroads do everything possible to defer any and all maintenance. Practically every train arrives late, but the customers can't really do much about it (how else are you going to move 4 million pounds of coal?)
Yeah, kind of like when they put ‘style’ on the end of a product that copies the aesthetic of something without functionally being that thing— like a kosher-style deli or a professional-style stove— the mainstream democratic leaders are pro-labor-style politicians.
I've been out for a couple years and was just a code monkey anyway. But they did treat me poorly, and it was quite shocking seeing how the sausage was made.
The problem is, overtaking is one thing when you got two parallel rails and ample point switches.
But when you don't have them or only every 100km or whatnot, or any of the potential places (such as in a train station) just isn't long enough to accept and buffer a 3 miles long train... then good luck, there just is no physical opportunity for the faster passenger train to speed ahead, not to mention the absurd amount of energy wasted in braking and then re-accelerating that 3 mile freight monster.
Fixing this would be possible - either by limiting the maximum length of a train or by forcing the extension of parallel rail segments. The former makes logistics significantly more challenging plus it requires more staff (which is the real problem, long haul isn't wanted much these days, neither rail nor road), the latter is darn expensive and someone has to foot the bill - Congress certainly won't.
> ...not to mention the absurd amount of energy wasted in braking and then re-accelerating that 3 mile freight monster.
> Fixing this would be possible - either by limiting the maximum length of a train...
It can't be both. Splitting a freight train and then stopping and starting the smaller trains would take the same amount of energy as stopping and starting the single long freight train.
Unless they're deliberately moving empty freight cars to make it artificially long.
> Fun fact: by law, Amtrak has priority. Not that it matters much, even back when laws themselves mattered.
Are you sure about that? I've never looked up the law, but my understanding is that, for most (all?) of its routes, Amtrak is running on privately owned track, and, on such track, freight has priority.
(I'm surprised at the number of downvotes. The replies indicated that I'm wrong, which is awesome in the sense that I like riding Amtrak and want it to have priority, and so I understand the frustration; but I think that I cannot be the only one who has heard from every Amtrak rider they've talked to that freight has priority, and surely it's a good thing to seek an authoritative answer? Maybe it looked like I was rhetorically saying that someone was wrong rather than honestly seeking clarification.)
I've been told that there's a legal loophole where freight trains are built to be too large to fit into overtaking loops, and so don't need to use them.
My understanding is that as part of the Amtrak Improvement Act[1] Amtrak is given preference over freight rail, even on private track. However only the Department of Justice may enforce this, which it has done only once.
Fair warning I haven't read the text of the law in full, only heard this second hand.
Due to the history of Amtrak this is actually true. The railroads in America (while privately owned and operated) were built with much government subsidy. The railroad companies originally provided passenger service. Eventually, to ensure this service continued a law was passed that prohibited railroads from dropping passe nger service. After the rise of personal cars coinciding with the massive federal investment in car infrastructure in the 1950s with the interstate hughway system, passenger rail travel was in free fall in the late 60s and the railroad companies begged to be allowed to end passenger service. Congress stepped in and nationalized the passenger service exempting the railroad companies from their mandate to provide passenger service while requiring them to give passenger trains priority in scheduling. So, TL;DR passenger trains have legally mandated priority over the freight trains of the host railroad.
Fun fact: by law, Amtrak has priority. Not that it matters much, even back when laws themselves mattered.