Why can’t this country get rail service right?
Hint: We get what we pay for, and we haven’t paid much into the system
Already an hour delayed on a Northeast Regional train parked at New York’s Moynihan Station, I could see snacks and drinks in the cafe car, but no attendant to serve them.
After waiting a few minutes, the conductor came by and told us that the region-wide shutdown of trains meant that even our crew could not reach us.
“This train isn’t going anywhere in the next 45 minutes,” he said. “We could be here for three or four hours.”
Drinks would have to wait.
A signal issue near Metropark, N.J., caused a widespread stoppage throughout the region. My hour-and-20-minute ride to Philadelphia for dinner was on hold indefinitely.
This was my second time in four months traveling this stretch of track, and the second multi-hour delay. In March, a brush fire near Edison brought all trains to a standstill, and my New Orleans-bound Crescent sat at the Rahway train station for more than four hours.
I have written plenty about the joys of slow rail travel — I built a whole website on it for my master’s degree — but with a warning to others to assume that Amtrak trains will be significantly delayed.
The Northeast Corridor, from Boston to Washington, D.C., however, is the one stretch of rail in this country known for its efficiency.
Trains hit top speeds of 150 mph, the line is electrified, and Amtrak owns the tracks, so trains are not subject to freight delays as they are in the rest of the country.
Not always.
During both my delays this year, I sought information from Twitter, where I could read accounts from other passengers — who was moving and who wasn’t, who heard what from their crews.
Between that information, I read scathing comments about Amtrak, ridiculing management for the travel delays.
Annoyed as I was with the delays, I had to chime in to remind them:
Current management did not cause these delays, nor were the delays inherent to the nature of rail travel.
They were, instead, the result of decades of policy decisions.
Since the 1950s, we have poured billions into roads and airports, while giving pennies to our rail infrastructure.
As far back as 1959, more than a decade before the creation of Amtrak, the problem and its causes were clear. In April of that year, Trains magazine ran a cover story, “Who Shot the Passenger Train.”
In it, longtime Trains editor David P. Morgan wrote:
“The passenger train is not dying of old age, it was shot in the back.”
In the more than 60-year-old piece, Morgan wrote statements that hold true today, namely that Americans subsidize air and automobile travel, while expecting train travel to survive on its own:
“The totals involved are staggering — an investment of 4 billion dollars in civil airports, almost 1.4 billion spent to date on the Federal airways system, and 441.3 million disbursed since 1938 in direct airline cash subsidies. From 1921 through 1955 Government has financed more than 93 billion dollars’ worth of pavement construction and maintenance. It is difficult to do battle with such amounts when your weapon is a railroad plant currently worth 27.8 billion dollars after depreciation, of which only a minor element is allocated to passenger service.”
This downward spiral continued into the 1960s, reaching an unsustainable low that forced the government to take action.
With the Nixon administration adamantly opposed to nationalization or subsidies, the Rail Passenger Service Act of 1970 established the National Railroad Passenger Corporation, authorizing $40 million ($257 million in 2020) to pay for Amtrak’s start.
The funding inequities continue to this day:
- Today, Amtrak receives roughly $1.9 billion per year from the federal government.
- In contrast, the federal government alone spent $46 billion on highways in 2019.
For those curious to read more about this history, I would recommend Amtrak, America’s Railroad: Transportation’s Orphan and Its Struggle for Survival, by railroad historians Geoffrey H. Doughty, Jeffrey T. Darbee and Eugene E. Harmon.
They explain not just the who, what, when and where of Amtrak, but also a lot of all-important whys — why did private passenger rail need to be rescued, why is our current system struggling, and so forth.
The authors point out, for example, that Williston, North Dakota, opened a $273 million airport in 2017, financed with
- $106 million from the Federal Aviation Administration
- $55 million from the state
- and $112 million from bonds supported by airport revenues.
In 2020 it was served by one airline offering one flight per day to and from Denver.
This is why I cringe when I hear people talk about Amtrak “losing money” or needing to “turn a profit” — without applying the same language to our roads and airports.
As the authors of Amtrak: America’s Railroad point out:
Few people today understand that when air and bus lines show a profit, it is only because substantial public funding and hidden subsidies let them avoid the full costs of providing their services.
The $1 trillion Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act signed into law in November 2021 includes $66 billion for Amtrak, the largest investment in passenger rail since the creation of Amtrak. Funds will be used to address Amtrak’s repair backlog, modernize its fleet and reduce trip times.
This will help make passenger rail more comfortable and somewhat more efficient — but will not be enough to create true high-speed rail in this country.
When you consider that China has built more than 20,000 miles of high-speed rail and has a train that can reach more than 370 miles per hour — while the fastest Amtrak Acela trains reach 150 miles per hour in a few sections of the Northeast Corridor — it is clear that we have a long, long, long way to go.
I ended up missing my dinner in Philly on the Fourth of July weekend, showing up to the restaurant four hours late, just after the bill was paid. And that July 3 signal issue was only the beginning of a week of signaling delays on the same stretch of rail.
And as for my March trip, my train rolled into New Orleans nearly 6 hours late — though Amtrak did compensate me for that trip with a generous credit, as the delay hassle was compounded by a number of service issues on that journey.
So, if you ever find yourself sitting on a delayed train, or wondering why our trains lumber along at average speeds of 45 miles per hour while the rest of the world zips people around on hourly bullet trains, know that this is the system we created.
To paraphrase Morgan in 1959:
