Amtrak Has a Freight Train Problem
Trains are becoming more popular, which is good because they are significantly more carbon-efficient than cars or planes for trips. While Amtrak is most used in the northeast, it is also often cheaper than flying and with comparable travel times for mid-length trips, especially with bag fees and airport waiting times accounted for. Tucson to El Paso, for example, is $48 and 6 hours on Amtrak, compared to $175 and 3 hours by plane. Between Kansas City and St. Louis is $50 and 6 hours on Amtrak, compared to $122 and 4.5 hours on a plane.
The primary issue facing Amtrak’s perception is reliability: trains are often delayed, often on the order of hours. It’s worth asking, however, how often these delays are due to factors outside of Amtrak’s control, like weather, and how often it is due to equipment issues, or other causes not immediately obvious.
Amtrak has a Twitter account dedicated to announcing train delays and other alerts for trains outside the northeast, @AmtrakAlerts. We can scrape these tweets to determine the reasons and severity of Amtrak delays over the past year — this involves some interesting data science techniques that I’ll cover in a separate article.
First, a statement about the limitations of the data. This only covers delays that @AmtrakAlerts decided to tweet about and include a reason for in their tweets; about a sixth of the delay events lacked a reason, with delays of around 40 minutes on average. Additionally, trains can be delayed for several reasons, and this dataset is unable to reliably tease out the relative contributions of each reason. Finally, this only considers delays, not other scheduling issues such as cancellation or bus-bridging.
With that said, let’s look at the most common and most severe reasons for Amtrak delays.
Freight train interference is by far the most common cause of Amtrak delays, involved in one-third of all delays for which a reason was given. Freight train interference was the sole cause of nearly as many delays as the second most common overall cause!
In terms of total delay time, freight train interference again takes a commanding lead, with over 1,000 more hours of delay caused at least in part by this interference than by mechanical issues. Freight trains give Amtrak headaches in other ways, too, with disabled freight trains blocking tracks (7%, 961 hours) and freight train congestion (2%, 236 hours) yielding significant delays. Shockingly, 43% and 3,867 hours of Amtrak’s delays for which a reason was given were related to freight trains, with 27% and 2,332 hours due solely to freight train issues.
If you ask Amtrak about delays, they will point to freight train interference as a primary cause of delay. It turns out, according to Amtrak, that freight trains are illegally giving themselves priority over Amtrak trains and causing this massive suite of delays. Amtrak, for its part, is currently unable to force the freight companies to abide by the law, although Congress is currently considering legislation that would allow for this.
The next biggest cause of delays is due to mechanical issues and joins a series of other equipment- and infrastructure-related reasons for rail delays, including signal issues, track work, and engine issues. While not as prominent as freight train interference, combined these reasons are involved in 37% of delays totaling 2,840 hours and are the sole reasons for 19% and 1,319 hours of delays. Rail congestion, the third most common cause of delays, also speaks to the limitations and inefficiencies of our rail infrastructure.
Finally, the last significant cause of delays involves events outside the rail world: vehicles on the tracks, weather events like heat and storms, and police activity. While annoying, they are the sort of delays we expect from our transportation sources — storms famously wreck both airport schedules and highways.
When I first heard that the largest source of Amtrak delays was freight train interference, it sounded like a bad cop-out. “Surely there are other issues with our underfunded and underutilized train system,” I thought. But this analysis was rather eye-opening: freight trains are a menace to passenger transport. Amtrak gets a bad rap for reliability issues, and while there are certainly areas in which Amtrak could improve, there’s just no getting around the 43% of incidents caused in part by freight trains. That is, at least, until passenger rail is given the legal protections and funding it deserves.