tl;dr piece argues reason US passenger rail is slow is because of rail-freight being better value for private railroads, thus causing US railways to be optimised for freight and making it...
tl;dr piece argues reason US passenger rail is slow is because of rail-freight being better value for private railroads, thus causing US railways to be optimised for freight and making it nigh-impossible to have fast&cheap passenger rail
Europe is different because shipping is more practical (more coastal ports) + more regulatory intervention by government to encourage/subsidise passenger rail
strongest counterargument I've found so far is that the difference in cargo type affects the incentives. US still transports a lot of coal whereas this is less common in Europe, which allows for...
strongest counterargument I've found so far is that the difference in cargo type affects the incentives. US still transports a lot of coal whereas this is less common in Europe, which allows for slow, long trains which are described in the article, but as coal gets phased out those trains will become less common as freight is dominated by more time-sensitive loads, undoing some of the negative incentives As of 2023, coal accounted for 28% of total rail tonnage
Also the article mentions but underemphasises the importance of how big & empty the US is compared to europe, making rail freight inherently more attractive independent of regulatory choices
oh also swiss rail sorta damages the argument because they have both plenty of passenger and freight on their railways, even though the conditions are slightly different in some obvious ways
Also it's very handwavy about why US has to intermingle freight and passengers and can't just build separate railways
overall I think the article is factually correct and useful but talks insufficiently about upstream factors that create the premise that freight and passenger rail have to be shared
(this is obviously partially attributable to the fact that this article is written for a conservative journal, something I only checked after reading the article but had some suspicions)
Obviously anecdotal, but I've taken the Empire Builder several times and on at least two of the trips we actually had to pull on to a siding for like 30ish minutes to let a freight train pass by....
Obviously anecdotal, but I've taken the Empire Builder several times and on at least two of the trips we actually had to pull on to a siding for like 30ish minutes to let a freight train pass by. The conductor explained that freight trains get right-of-way, at least in part because freight companies own the tracks. I'm sure things are different in the Northeast corridor where Amtrak has more clout.
While Amtrak technically is supposed to get right-of-way, freight trains are now just too long to fit into the sidings to let Amtrak pass. Since Amtrak trains can comfortably fit in those sidings...
While Amtrak technically is supposed to get right-of-way, freight trains are now just too long to fit into the sidings to let Amtrak pass. Since Amtrak trains can comfortably fit in those sidings and the government has never really enforced Amtrak's right-of-way, the freight trains push Amtrak into the sidings and take precedence.
This was pre-(effective)-internet and before they ran massive oversize trains that couldn't fit on sidings, but my mom fell in love with the idea of overnight trains from those old black and white...
This was pre-(effective)-internet and before they ran massive oversize trains that couldn't fit on sidings, but my mom fell in love with the idea of overnight trains from those old black and white movies. We were planning a vacation and decided to include a sleeper train to Chicago. Found this one train that was supposed to go from Salt Lake through Denver and then wandered east into Chicago. I think it was supposed to be like 28 hours or something?
We looked at the schedules and found this one that was supposed to stop briefly in Denver for more passengers, and then was supposed to leave a couple hours before sunset. We thought that would be cool: sitting in the observation car, watching the sunset over the Rocky Mountains, have the late dinner after sunset, maybe see if the stars were out, head to bed in our sleeper cabin, sleep through a lot of the Great Plains.
We reckoned without the freight trains. Again, this was before the mega-freight trains, and they were supposed to give priority to Amtrak, but they didn't. We got to Denver and were told we needed to wait for two freight trains to pass us. Which, fine. What they didn't say was how far behind us the freight trains were, or how far ahead of us we needed to let them get. istg, we were supposed to leave Denver around 4pm, and we didn't leave until after 2am, and we weren't allowed off the train.
So our actual trip went: get to Denver. Wander fruitlessly around train in Denver for 10 hours; spend much of the time in the cabin because there isn't much to see from the observation car when it's inside the station. Have dinner - except since the train wasn't moving, they didn't fire up the kitchen; they brought us pack sandwiches and chips from somewhere outside the train (very different from the salmon and asparagus my mom was looking forward to, and they all contained meat, which my vegetarian self did not appreciate. I asked about alternate food and they brought me three cookies as my dinner). Finally give up around 11pm and head to bed. Takes about an hour to fall asleep, only to be woken up two hours later when we finally set off.
Sleep all the way through the descent through the Rocky Mountains, be awake for almost the entire journey through the Great Plains (very tedious landscape), and finally pull into Chicago. Fortunately, we'd planned to spend the night and part of the morning in Chicago; as it was, we just barely made our connection.
Well, at least my mom got to do her sleeper train thing. :(
These are particular examples of a general problem. Across the American rail network, passenger trains run slower today than they did before the Second World War. What happened?
None of the obvious explanations, like underinvestment in rail assets or the ubiquity of car culture, solve the puzzle. If car culture were determinative, we cannot explain why Europe maintains faster rail service than the United States, even though 74 percent of European intercity trips are taken by automobile, only modestly below America’s 85 percent. And political will cannot be the binding constraint either, since bipartisan infrastructure bills consistently include rail funding, but none have reversed the decline.
These explanations fail because they assume something has gone wrong. If we start instead with the premise that something has gone right, the puzzle solves itself. American passenger trains are slow because the United States established a framework after 1970 that made optimization for freight service inevitable. Private railroads, freed from mandatory passenger service, rationally invested in what paid: moving cargo. That optimization succeeded spectacularly: today, America moves over five thousand ton-miles of freight per person annually by rail, a rate nine times that of Europe’s and fifty-four times Japan’s.
Put another way, the United States has excellent intercity rail service . . . for freight. The United States features the most productive freight railroad in the world, and by optimizing for that, it has chosen not to pursue passenger speed. Doing both simultaneously on shared infrastructure is difficult, if not impossible. Four interlocking barriers—incentive structures, infrastructure standards, regulatory requirements, and operational arrangements—keep passenger speeds low: not by accident, but by design.
The American choice made sense given American conditions. The geography here favored freight: vast distances between population centers, bulk commodity production (grain, coal, minerals) in the interior requiring long-haul transport to coastal ports, and low population density that makes frequent passenger service uneconomical outside a few corridors. Ownership structures favored freight: private railroads answering to shareholders had to earn returns on capital, and that meant maximizing returns from freight, since Amtrak had assumed responsibility for passengers. Competition favored freight: trucking could not and cannot match rail’s cost advantage for bulk commodities over continental distances. American freight railroads move cargo at roughly one-quarter the cost per ton-mile of trucking; for bulk goods over long distances, rail has no effective competitor.
Given different conditions in Europe, Europeans made different choices. Geography there favors passengers: shorter distances between major cities, higher population density, and an extensive coastline that made coastal shipping competitive for freight. Ownership favored passengers: state-owned railways accountable to politicians naturally chose to serve citizens, not shareholders, meaning that passenger service was politically visible and salient in a way that freight was not. And competition favored passengers: high fuel taxes made driving expensive, and rail remained competitive with air for journeys of two hundred to six hundred kilometers where travel times between city centers favored trains over the airport-to-airport-plus-security-ritual of flying.
Amtrak’s statutory dispatching preference exists on paper, but enforcement has been vanishingly rare. Until 2024, the Department of Justice had brought exactly one lawsuit to enforce Amtrak’s statutory rights: a 1979 case against Southern Pacific over the Sunset Limited between New Orleans and Houston, which ended in a consent decree without a final court ruling. In July 2024, the DOJ filed a second suit, this time against Norfolk Southern (NS) for its handling of the Crescent, which settled in 2025 with explicit commitments to prioritize Amtrak trains and require supervisor approval for any dispatching decision that does not. Two lawsuits in forty-five years is not a robust enforcement regime. And Amtrak has paid a price for it: freight train interference remains the leading cause of Amtrak delays on host railroads, causing over 850,000 minutes of delay in 2024, more than any other single category of delay.
The realistic paths forward are more modest. On specific corridors with sufficient traffic, like Michigan, Virginia, North Carolina, or California, public acquisition and sustained investment can produce genuine improvement. The toolkit exists: purchase strategic segments, fund ongoing maintenance, transfer dispatching authority, design investments that serve freight interests alongside passenger interests (as Virginia’s Potomac crossing does for CSX). These interventions work and can be replicated.
But they will not produce a European-style national network. That gap is structural, driven by geography, commodity flows, population distribution, and the competitive position of alternative modes. These are facts about the physical and economic landscape, not mere policy failures we can correct.
The European coast is also all connected to itself, while taking a boat from New York to LA requires crossing the Arctic Circle, the Panama Canal, rounding Cape Horn (infamously hazardous to...
The European coast is also all connected to itself, while taking a boat from New York to LA requires crossing the Arctic Circle, the Panama Canal, rounding Cape Horn (infamously hazardous to shipping), or circumnavigating the globe.
All I can do is sigh. Even for a state-level project we get bogged down in politics that works against the best interests of the people. And it only gets worse on the national level's decades long...
Building separate passenger infrastructure avoids this trade-off but introduces another: expense. California’s high-speed rail project, the most ambitious attempt at dedicated passenger track in a generation, has seen costs balloon from $33 billion to over $100 billion, with completion decades away, if it is completed at all.
All I can do is sigh. Even for a state-level project we get bogged down in politics that works against the best interests of the people. And it only gets worse on the national level's decades long gridlock.
Whether to unmake it is a decision that we should make with clear understanding of what would be gained, and what would be lost.
It's a shame we aren't given much of a choice, given the above example in my state.
CHSR has made me pretty pessimistic about the future. California is what, the 6th or 7th largest “country” by GDP and we can’t get this done in a reasonable timeframe? It just feels like every...
CHSR has made me pretty pessimistic about the future. California is what, the 6th or 7th largest “country” by GDP and we can’t get this done in a reasonable timeframe? It just feels like every aspect of building in this country is fundamentally broken. It’s obviously an ambitious project and involves a lot of land, which balloons complexity, but it’s so dispiriting and makes me feel extremely apathetic
Factually this article is quite correct as to why our passenger trains are so slow and functionally useless: if we were to force railroads to make shorter trains that could get out of the way for...
Factually this article is quite correct as to why our passenger trains are so slow and functionally useless: if we were to force railroads to make shorter trains that could get out of the way for passenger trains, the cost of shipping freight by rail would be so high as to effectively drive the railroads out of business because over the road trucking can do the same thing for far less money when you don’t have those mile long trains driving down the costs of rail shipping.
I used to work in intermodal and drayage dispatching local and regional trucks with pickups at the sea ports, airports, and rails, and the only reason we rarely did full long haul was because there were very few routes that were profitable enough to justify an owner/operator being paid a fair rate, and for us to get a big enough cut to be worth the dispatch and for a low enough rate for the customer to not just send it by rail to the nearest rail yard and get a Last Mile or regional trucking company to take it.
Only certain hazmat loads really warranted that, and some commodities that require careful handling. Did you know that under the right circumstances getting cotton bales wet (specifically bales, not loose or woven cotton to my knowledge) can cause them to catch fire, thus requiring drivers that know what to do in event of a bale fire? Fun thing I learned working in that industry.
Back to the rail speed issue. The obvious solution is to build high speed rail, which requires its own infrastructure. Major corridors like San Francisco to San Diego with Los Angeles in between, a triangle between Dallas, Houston and San Antonio with Austin somewhere in there, and service between Chicago and New York with a few stops in between (Cleveland, Pittsburgh, Philly maybe) would be your first major corridors that would see extensive use.
But the costs of urban center to urban center passenger travel with brand new infrastructure is prohibitively expensive to start with, and the inevitable Imminent Domain takeovers and lack of ongoing political will are apt to draw tons of legal headaches and entanglements and project scope drawdowns over the years.
There’s billions to be spent and millions to be made. It’s discouraging because in a reasonable society we’d just accept that it’s a service that we provide to ourselves and not a business that needs to turn a profit, but that’s a rant for another thread.
tl;dr piece argues reason US passenger rail is slow is because of rail-freight being better value for private railroads, thus causing US railways to be optimised for freight and making it nigh-impossible to have fast&cheap passenger rail
Europe is different because shipping is more practical (more coastal ports) + more regulatory intervention by government to encourage/subsidise passenger rail
strongest counterargument I've found so far is that the difference in cargo type affects the incentives. US still transports a lot of coal whereas this is less common in Europe, which allows for slow, long trains which are described in the article, but as coal gets phased out those trains will become less common as freight is dominated by more time-sensitive loads, undoing some of the negative incentives
As of 2023, coal accounted for 28% of total rail tonnage
Also the article mentions but underemphasises the importance of how big & empty the US is compared to europe, making rail freight inherently more attractive independent of regulatory choices
oh also swiss rail sorta damages the argument because they have both plenty of passenger and freight on their railways, even though the conditions are slightly different in some obvious ways
Also it's very handwavy about why US has to intermingle freight and passengers and can't just build separate railways
overall I think the article is factually correct and useful but talks insufficiently about upstream factors that create the premise that freight and passenger rail have to be shared
(this is obviously partially attributable to the fact that this article is written for a conservative journal, something I only checked after reading the article but had some suspicions)
Obviously anecdotal, but I've taken the Empire Builder several times and on at least two of the trips we actually had to pull on to a siding for like 30ish minutes to let a freight train pass by. The conductor explained that freight trains get right-of-way, at least in part because freight companies own the tracks. I'm sure things are different in the Northeast corridor where Amtrak has more clout.
While Amtrak technically is supposed to get right-of-way, freight trains are now just too long to fit into the sidings to let Amtrak pass. Since Amtrak trains can comfortably fit in those sidings and the government has never really enforced Amtrak's right-of-way, the freight trains push Amtrak into the sidings and take precedence.
This was pre-(effective)-internet and before they ran massive oversize trains that couldn't fit on sidings, but my mom fell in love with the idea of overnight trains from those old black and white movies. We were planning a vacation and decided to include a sleeper train to Chicago. Found this one train that was supposed to go from Salt Lake through Denver and then wandered east into Chicago. I think it was supposed to be like 28 hours or something?
We looked at the schedules and found this one that was supposed to stop briefly in Denver for more passengers, and then was supposed to leave a couple hours before sunset. We thought that would be cool: sitting in the observation car, watching the sunset over the Rocky Mountains, have the late dinner after sunset, maybe see if the stars were out, head to bed in our sleeper cabin, sleep through a lot of the Great Plains.
We reckoned without the freight trains. Again, this was before the mega-freight trains, and they were supposed to give priority to Amtrak, but they didn't. We got to Denver and were told we needed to wait for two freight trains to pass us. Which, fine. What they didn't say was how far behind us the freight trains were, or how far ahead of us we needed to let them get. istg, we were supposed to leave Denver around 4pm, and we didn't leave until after 2am, and we weren't allowed off the train.
So our actual trip went: get to Denver. Wander fruitlessly around train in Denver for 10 hours; spend much of the time in the cabin because there isn't much to see from the observation car when it's inside the station. Have dinner - except since the train wasn't moving, they didn't fire up the kitchen; they brought us pack sandwiches and chips from somewhere outside the train (very different from the salmon and asparagus my mom was looking forward to, and they all contained meat, which my vegetarian self did not appreciate. I asked about alternate food and they brought me three cookies as my dinner). Finally give up around 11pm and head to bed. Takes about an hour to fall asleep, only to be woken up two hours later when we finally set off.
Sleep all the way through the descent through the Rocky Mountains, be awake for almost the entire journey through the Great Plains (very tedious landscape), and finally pull into Chicago. Fortunately, we'd planned to spend the night and part of the morning in Chicago; as it was, we just barely made our connection.
Well, at least my mom got to do her sleeper train thing. :(
This is something that I hadn't considered, and I appreciate up bringing it up!
The European coast is also all connected to itself, while taking a boat from New York to LA requires crossing the Arctic Circle, the Panama Canal, rounding Cape Horn (infamously hazardous to shipping), or circumnavigating the globe.
All I can do is sigh. Even for a state-level project we get bogged down in politics that works against the best interests of the people. And it only gets worse on the national level's decades long gridlock.
It's a shame we aren't given much of a choice, given the above example in my state.
CHSR has made me pretty pessimistic about the future. California is what, the 6th or 7th largest “country” by GDP and we can’t get this done in a reasonable timeframe? It just feels like every aspect of building in this country is fundamentally broken. It’s obviously an ambitious project and involves a lot of land, which balloons complexity, but it’s so dispiriting and makes me feel extremely apathetic
Factually this article is quite correct as to why our passenger trains are so slow and functionally useless: if we were to force railroads to make shorter trains that could get out of the way for passenger trains, the cost of shipping freight by rail would be so high as to effectively drive the railroads out of business because over the road trucking can do the same thing for far less money when you don’t have those mile long trains driving down the costs of rail shipping.
I used to work in intermodal and drayage dispatching local and regional trucks with pickups at the sea ports, airports, and rails, and the only reason we rarely did full long haul was because there were very few routes that were profitable enough to justify an owner/operator being paid a fair rate, and for us to get a big enough cut to be worth the dispatch and for a low enough rate for the customer to not just send it by rail to the nearest rail yard and get a Last Mile or regional trucking company to take it.
Only certain hazmat loads really warranted that, and some commodities that require careful handling. Did you know that under the right circumstances getting cotton bales wet (specifically bales, not loose or woven cotton to my knowledge) can cause them to catch fire, thus requiring drivers that know what to do in event of a bale fire? Fun thing I learned working in that industry.
Back to the rail speed issue. The obvious solution is to build high speed rail, which requires its own infrastructure. Major corridors like San Francisco to San Diego with Los Angeles in between, a triangle between Dallas, Houston and San Antonio with Austin somewhere in there, and service between Chicago and New York with a few stops in between (Cleveland, Pittsburgh, Philly maybe) would be your first major corridors that would see extensive use.
But the costs of urban center to urban center passenger travel with brand new infrastructure is prohibitively expensive to start with, and the inevitable Imminent Domain takeovers and lack of ongoing political will are apt to draw tons of legal headaches and entanglements and project scope drawdowns over the years.
There’s billions to be spent and millions to be made. It’s discouraging because in a reasonable society we’d just accept that it’s a service that we provide to ourselves and not a business that needs to turn a profit, but that’s a rant for another thread.