Passenger Trains > Who has priority, freight trains or Amtrak?

I'm now visiting my brother-in-law in Omaha who worked for UP for 35 years, in the accounting department.
He says I should never consider riding Amtrak because freight trains have priority and Amtrak will always be late and unpleasant.
I say that Amtrak has priority, although they maybe late for other reasons. How unpleasant they may be depends upon the crew.

We are considering a round trip San Diego to Washington DC and back in the fall. We'd have to book the handicap room as I am in a wheelchair although I can walk a few feet with something to hang onto.
Should we consider Amtrak in spite of my brother-in-law. 

Upper level diners are certainly an impediment so most likely you will need to have meals brought down to your lower level room, this shouldn't be an issue.  If you go through New Orleans the 2nd leg will be on the Crescent which is all single level so you could get to the dining car, just plan your moves if possible when train is stopped at a station.  

​If you go through Chicago then the 2nd leg will be on train 30 and will be same as first leg above.  You might want to go through New Orleans in one direction and Chicago in the other.  Scenery on Crescent is boring to say the least.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 04/30/16 06:49 by PennPlat.

Sounds like your brother-in-law has some issues. Wonder if he has any actual experience with Amtrak?

He was a bean counter. He doesn't even watch trains.

He gives me his yearly callendar.

Rick
 

In all our years of Amtrak travel we suffered only one major delay. It was 12 hours due to a washout at Del Rio, Texas.

The Sunset Limited was stopped after departing San Antonio and pulled back to San Antonio. Amtrak provided buses for those who wished to continue their journey immediately. The bus transfer was well handled.

We stayed aboard the train because we were traveling in a sleeping car, and were in no hurry to get home.

We arrived in Los Angeles about 12 hours late.

I remember only one occasion when we had an unsatisfactory car attendant.

OCV

Depends on Host RR and attitude. UP has the worst of all the hosts and would park Amtrak if the could.
Look at 5 and 6 right now they are on time or near on time.
Steve

wpjones Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> Depends on Host RR and attitude. UP has the worst
> of all the hosts and would park Amtrak if the
> could.
> Look at 5 and 6 right now they are on time or near
> on time.
> Steve

Doesn't your question contradict your statement about UP?

I also worked for decades on behalf of UP in much more relevant positions than your relative.  Let's start during the unhappy days following the UP-SP merger.  Amtrak complained to the feds that UP was failing to give priority to Amtrak trains.  We investigated the worst complaints in great detail using dispatching records.  There was always an explanation for delays: a train ahead broke apart; a car-train accident up the line; maintenance work; livestock on the track; signal problems; an Amtrak power failure; severe congestion where the dispatcher did the best possible for Amtrak; etc.  Dispatchers wanted to get Amtrak trains off their territories as fast as possible and made reasonable decisions to avoid delays.  They wouldn't stab a UP Z train for an hour to avoid a five-minute delay to Amtrak, so Amtrak wasn't always given "perfect priority," which Amtrak would like and no railroad can give, but UP's policy was to give reasonable priority, and UP did. 

In some instances, before UP almost completely rebuilt the SP and parts of DRGW (west of Grand Junction), some tracks that Amtrak used had slow orders.  UP and Amtrak reached an agreement on how to remove those, which helped Amtrak performance.  

Remember that Amtrak's understanding of delays is based on what its on-train conductors perceive.  They do their best, but they often have no idea what is happening outside their trains, much less what is happening 75 miles ahead where that signal failed or the switch is stuck.  I have been on Amtrak trains where the conductor announced a delay due to a freight train and was right, but I've also heard conductors claim freight-train delay when they were in the dark and completely wrong.  

Do you know what the most consistently reliable Amtrak route is in the United States?  It's not the NEC that Amtrak owns, not even for the Acelas.  It's the Capital Corridor on UP, consistently above 95% on time.  When you work with a good partner like CC that is willing to spend some money to support its own service, UP performs beautifully.  Unfortunately, Congress consistently starves Amtrak, with predictable results across the country. 

Ignore your brother in law. It seems he has never ridden a train. Amtrak is a great way to go. You can ignore UP bashers as well as people with a chip on their shoulder.

Posted from Android

I agree 100%.

stash Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> Ignore your brother in law. It seems he has never
> ridden a train. Amtrak is a great way to go. You
> can ignore UP bashers as well as people with a
> chip on their shoulder.
>
> Posted from Android

I have ridden Amtrak dozens of times over UP tracks in the western USA.   I can remember 4 substantional delays (12 hours or more).  One from extreme cold across Nevada lowering speed limits for many hours.   One from very heavy snow in Sierra Nevada that periodically closed line due to signal problems..   One from a derailment near Martinez, CA causing the eastbound Calif Zephyr to be rerouted via Altamont Pass to Sacramento.   One from a snow speader derailment in Sierra Nevada causing westbound CZ to be annulled in Reno.   Amtrak put all passengers up at their expense in Reno hotel for departure on next morning's CZ. I would guess that about 90% of trips were ontime, 5% a couple hours late, remaining 5% more than 2 hours late (including 4 mentioned above).

If you would like to take the train, do it.  Pay no attention to your brother-in-law who has no trouble sharing baseless opinions.    Plan ahead, as sleeper space is usually at a premium.

Can't say anything for the UP but in 2013 I made a trip to PA from MT on the Builder we were 8 hrs late into Chicago missing the Capitol Ltd. They put us up in a 5 Star hotel gave us money for breakfast and put us on the next train out of Chi.

jmhemmer Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> I also worked for decades on behalf of UP in much
> more relevant positions than your relative.
>  Let's start during the unhappy days following
> the UP-SP merger.  Amtrak complained to the feds
> that UP was failing to give priority to Amtrak
> trains.  We investigated the worst complaints in
> great detail using dispatching records.  There
> was always an explanation for delays: a train
> ahead broke apart; a car-train accident up the
> line; maintenance work; livestock on the track;
> signal problems; an Amtrak power failure; severe
> congestion where the dispatcher did the best
> possible for Amtrak; etc.  Dispatchers wanted to
> get Amtrak trains off their territories as fast as
> possible and made reasonable decisions to avoid
> delays.  They wouldn't stab a UP Z train for an
> hour to avoid a five-minute delay to Amtrak, so
> Amtrak wasn't always given "perfect priority,"
> which Amtrak would like and no railroad can give,
> but UP's policy was to give reasonable priority,
> and UP did. 
>
> In some instances, before UP almost completely
> rebuilt the SP and parts of DRGW (west of Grand
> Junction), some tracks that Amtrak used had slow
> orders.  UP and Amtrak reached an agreement on
> how to remove those, which helped Amtrak
> performance.  
>
> Remember that Amtrak's understanding of delays is
> based on what its on-train conductors perceive.
>  They do their best, but they often have no idea
> what is happening outside their trains, much less
> what is happening 75 miles ahead where that signal
> failed or the switch is stuck.  I have been on
> Amtrak trains where the conductor announced a
> delay due to a freight train and was right, but
> I've also heard conductors claim freight-train
> delay when they were in the dark and completely
> wrong.  
>
> Do you know what the most consistently reliable
> Amtrak route is in the United States?  It's not
> the NEC that Amtrak owns, not even for the Acelas.
>  It's the Capital Corridor on UP, consistently
> above 95% on time.  When you work with a good
> partner like CC that is willing to spend some
> money to support its own service, UP performs
> beautifully.  Unfortunately, Congress
> consistently starves Amtrak, with predictable
> results across the country. 
THANK YOU for your intelligent discussion of this issue. 

jmhemmer Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> When you work with a good
> partner like CC that is willing to spend some
> money to support its own service, UP performs
> beautifully.  

Really!????  UP got a BILLION dollars to upgrade the St. Louis corridor and things have only gotten worse since the project started in 2010.

9900 Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> jmhemmer Wrote:
> --------------------------------------------------
> -----
> > When you work with a good
> > partner like CC that is willing to spend some
> > money to support its own service, UP performs
> > beautifully.  
>
> Really!????  UP got a BILLION dollars to upgrade
> the St. Louis corridor and things have only gotten
> worse since the project started in 2010.

How do the California and Illinois contracts compare? 

I had the impression that California keeps a pretty close tab on Amtrak's good performance.  Illinois? Maybe not as close.

Amtrak has now been reduced to a lower form of transportaion than Greyhound. Hope no one is in a hurry, no one will ever get anywhere on time again. I will never ride it again. Be faster to walk.

Back in the late 80's or early 90's my dad made some connection with someone working in the South Charleston, WV yard office. We showed up, got close to some locomotives, and I walked out with a big CSX calendar and a ton of Operation Lifesaver stuff.

I had no camera and have only vague recollections of the event (that and the goodies they gave me). The memory I do have is that there was a big printout from a color plotter on one of the desks. It was maybe 2' x 3' and in color. It was a track layout of the division or subdivision I assume, but what stood out was that right under whatever the title was was this:

AMTRAK ON TIME

There were several other "instructions" under that, but only this one has stuck in my head all these years. To me it was indicative of a corporate emphasis that, above pretty much anything else, keeping Amtrak trains on time was a priority.

Posted from iPhone

Jared Hamilton
Scott Depot, WV

wpjones Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> Depends on Host RR and attitude. UP has the worst
> of all the hosts and would park Amtrak if the
> could.
> Look at 5 and 6 right now they are on time or near
> on time.
> Steve

UP's OTP for the Coast Starlight in March was 87%, which is better than the Amtrak dispatched and maintained NEC. 
Cal Zephyr at 77% on UP, not quite as good, but better than Silver Service, Crescent, Capitol,,etc.
on. Par with SW Chief, Lake Shore.

chessie2101 Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------

> I had no camera and have only vague recollections
> of the event (that and the goodies they gave me).
> The memory I do have is that there was a big
> printout from a color plotter on one of the desks.
> It was maybe 2' x 3' and in color. It was a track
> layout of the division or subdivision I assume,
> but what stood out was that right under whatever
> the title was was this:
>
> AMTRAK ON TIME

That was a sign that somewhere in management, someone understood, at least somewhat.

The most obvious element is that railroads get paid to run Amtrak on time. To care about that, someone has to realize that Amtrak can be as profitable for the railroad as their hottest customer. Amtrak furnishes the engines, the cars, the yards, the crews, fuel and equipment maintenance, the administration (including positions in host railroad management that nobody ever mentions), and contributes to track maintenance. UPS does none of that. The industry was certain that Amtrak should pay more into maintenance because of their speed and the effect on the track. They hired Zeta Tech to develop the proof. There was no smoking gun, because a BB gun doesn't smoke. The differential the railroads thought could be defended wasn't there. That information quietly went away.

Second involves discipline. North American railroads love to improvise everything. Discipline takes too much work (I've been told that directly by senior management of railroads). Improvised operation is like Jazz. There is a variety of improvisation techniques.

Think of Benny Goodman, Glenn Miller, Tommy Dorsey, or any of their contemporaries. They played tightly structured music with periodic improvisation. Think of their successors Dizzy Gillespie, Miles Davis, or Charlie Parker. Their music was less structured and more improvised than their predecessors. In both cases, the music was predictable to some degree and repeatable. Predictable and repeatable were elements leading to popularity. Along came the Free Jazz folks such as Ornette Coleman, John Coltrane, and Pharaoh Sanders, playing virtually unstructured improvisation. It wasn't generally predictable or repeatable, and was generally cult music without a large popular following.

North American railroads prefer to play Free Jazz. They don't like to be bound by convention or structure. The result is often not predictable or repeatable. Since railroads don't produce music, instead of cult vs popular, the manifestation of displeasure is in the files of Surface Transportation Board.

Amtrak on time is more like Bebop. The railroad is improvised around a structure that promotes predictability and reliability. Some railroads understand this, others don't.

I think I have used the example here before, but I don't see it in a search. I was instrumental in restoring Amtrak service between Seattle and Vancouver BC. There was a lot of angst in some BN management. I was regularly told that I was going to destroy the company with the passenger trains. There were some heated arguments and some screaming and yelling about the impending bankruptcy of BN because of the new passenger service and the passenger service to come. At the time, the line between Seattle and Vancouver was a disaster. Freight trains were consolidated in order to reduce train starts. The trains they were running didn't fit anywhere, including between crossings anywhere. Meets were standoff meets (a standoff meet is the opposite of a headlight meet), sometimes hours in duration. It was taking two crews for almost every train and sometimes three or four to move a train between Everett and New Westminster or Vancouver BC. This was the era of Jerry Grinstein's attempt at Scheduled Railroad, also known as Precision Execution. There was a set of freight schedules for the line that had been worked out in detail. I know that because I was also assigned to Scheduled Railroad as well as passenger projects and was instrumental in the design of both. Local, division, and even system managers were ignoring the scheduled operation. It took away too much of their freedom to do what was convenient for them.

Even though managers were supposed to be evaluated on their on time performance (of freight service), they paid no attention to it. Train starts were down and since that was the indicator of the day, they were all proud and happy. The standard excuse was that on time freight operation was not possible. Freight On Time Performance was around 10%. They were using 30 or so crews a day to run 16 trains on 110 miles of railroad. Nobody cared. I'm not sure that anybody of any importance noticed. I learned during my tenure at BN about the heavy filtering applied to information on its way up. I got to see it first hand from the bottom and from the top.

Washington State added infrastructure to accommodate the passenger trains, but also infrastructure designed to eliminate some substantial freight operation problems. The infrastructure and the passenger schedules were designed around the structure of the scheduled freight operation (an inconvenient truth that has disappeared in the annals of time). Again, I know that because I designed the freight service, the passenger service, and the infrastructure requirements. Regardless, this was the beginning of the Apocalypse, Paradise Lost, or both. I was barraged with that story daily.

Then, a funny thing happened. The Top passed down an instruction: the new Amtrak trains WILL be on time. That was seen as the death knell. The Seattle - Vancouver BC trains started running and...oh no(!), on time performance of freight trains went to 100% and hours of service relief went to ZERO. Structure and discipline improved the operation. The subject was dropped in the halls of BN. Nobody wanted to hear it. Nobody wanted to talk about it. Nobody wanted it to go any farther than one subdivision, where it could be ignored.

The last BN operations gig I did was a set of system passenger schedules. The biggest deal was completely restructuring the Empire Builder, revisiting running time, recovery time, and determining points where 7 and 8 would meet and providing for that time in the schedules. Recovery time went from end loaded (8% of the Minneapolis - Seattle running time was added between Edmonds and Seattle, St Cloud and Minneapolis), to distributed (I think it is added at four places if I remember correctly) so that a train that was delayed could recover instead of getting later and later, hoping to recover all of it at the end. I made sure that the freight guys had a good solid chord structure to improvise to. It is so much easier to work around a train that will be in a known location at a known time every day than to figure it out as the game goes along. After the new schedules became effective, I got calls from Amtrak and from train dispatchers. They were amazed by the new on time performance and predictability of 7 and 8 and how easy it was to work around them when where they would be when was known every day instead of a guess.

There are folks at BNSF who get it. That is reflected in Amtrak performance. I still think that their operation is still a little on the more extreme Bebop side (more improvisation, less structure and discipline) to be completely effective, but concerning Amtrak and commuter trains, they get it.

TAW



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 05/01/16 14:27 by TAW.