The history of the US's Western freight lines is fascinating (and frustrating): we've allowed these massive companies (UP, BNSF) to extract rent for well over a century, in exchange for having laid down the original lines (which, mind you, were also paid for in land and bonds[1]).
Its long and complicated. Amtrak exists in the first place because once upon a time these freight operators were also the passenger operators. While today they look like "extracting rent", once upon a time they were forced by regulation to carry the burden of passenger service. The situation with Amtrak was basically the government agreeing to take over that before it killed the companies, but Amtrak would retain certain rights to demand the use of rail lines which an otherwise private operator might not be able to successfully negotiate over.
But its more complicated than that even. Because passenger rail was dying in the first place due to the massive subsidy the government gave to competing modes of transit in the form of the interstate highway act and later the subsidized construction of airports. So yeah, Railroads were supported by the government to begin with, but live by the subsidy die by the subsidy.
So really the history of railroads isn't at all a clear cut line between private and public interest. The current "massive companies" are a shadow of what they once were. Pennsylvania RR used to have a higher annual revenue than the Federal Government itself. New York Central wasn't far behind. By the 50s, these titans were in such decline they were forced to merge into "Penn Central". By the 60s, Penn Central was dead. Could you imagine Amazon having to merge with Walmart to survive by the 2030s, and going bankrupt anyway by the 2040s? This was more extreme than that.
This is all important context, and I thank you for including it.
I agree it's not as clear cut as "public versus private." But there's a recurring theme here: public money enabling private growth, followed by public money softening private decline. Railroads are just one instantiation of this pattern: it shows up in agriculture, industrial manufacturing, medical and materials research, &c.
At some point, it should make us stop and think about why we're transferring public money to private institutions and also paying for their mistakes, rather than just having the public institutions do the work themselves. One wonders what the US's rail infrastructure would look like had the US Government bought (and continued to operate) it outright, rather than merely socializing the losses in passenger sales.
We have an answer to that question. The answer is "Conrail" and "Amtrak". You can fairly argue that those were both very half-assed attempts to socialize the services, and were honestly both expected to fail from the start, but you can't say it hasn't been tried. The results were neither a failure nor a panacea. There is something more than a simple primary driving force like private/public interest needed to explain whats going on.
The railroads were sure funded by public money, but it most certainly has not been taxpayer money. Instead, it was money invested by private individuals. Government did help the railroads with vast grants of lands, but most of the value of the granted land stemmed from the railroads that were built nearby. It was in fact a great deal for taxpayers, a win-win situation.
> One wonders what the US's rail infrastructure would look like had the US Government bought (and continued to operate) it outright,
US federal government certainly is not known for providing high quality service at low cost, quite the opposite in fact.
> US federal government certainly is not known for providing high quality service at low cost, quite the opposite in fact.
The Post Office stands as a prime example of an extremely high quality service provided at a comparatively tiny price, and one that's successful and self-sustaining even while dealing with the immense costs of reliable delivery to extremely rural areas.
There was a Postal Service Reform Act of 2022[1], which apparently allows USPS to avoid funding pensions in advance, which had led to billions of dollars of debt. It also shifts new retiree health insurance to Medicare, which may be a zero sum game of sorts but good for the USPS budget.
Then there's that ongoing reliance on fees for delivering junk mail... I am somewhat disappointed that there isn't a junk mail non-delivery option. At least FedEx and UPS don't deliver junk mail. Yet.
Historically (pre-1900ish), the US Post Office was the quintessential American government sinecure.
The qualifications for postmaster general had more to do with campaign contributions than talent or interest.
Thankfully, largely reformed with the merit based civil service changes, but passing those was a struggle! So I'd be hesitant to assume than anything lucrative and government-run won't face substantial corruption pressures.
Really? When's the last time you had to go do something at the post office? It is a nightmare. Dirty building with disinterested workers, and long slow lines. The bulk of the mail I receive is junk mail, and multiple times a week I get my neighbor's mail.
As somebody that moved from Europe to the USA, I can attest that the USPS is the best postal system I have ever encountered. The service level is far above anything I saw in Scandinavia by a long shot. In Iceland the Postal Service is declining really rapidly, so much so that there isn’t even a post office any more down town in the countries biggest city. Yet in the USA you can get a package delivered to your door in rural Washington, all while sending a mail costs a fraction of what it costs in Scandinavia.
In Denmark I receive a letter roughly every 2 months.
It's not surprising that as volume has collapsed, prices have increased. However, I don't have any problem with the service, or with going to a kiosk or other shop to collect a parcel.
Partially. The German state owns 20% and is the largest shareholder. However those shares are not managed by government directly (as with Deutsche Bahn, the railway, where the traffic ministry has direct hold) but is held by the Kreditanstalt für Wiederaufbau, which is tasked with handling it economical, not political.
Of course that separation isn't complete and strict and there is political influence from that level and they have influence via specific post laws especially on the letter side (government has oversight on tarifs and requires deliver to everywhere in Germany etc. via monopoly laws)
Most interaction with USPS is at (residential) mailboxes. Sure, post office service is not great but they do a decent job of moving letters, post cards, and packages in a relatively timely manner - and the service for letters and postcards is damn cheap. In now remote / rural areas of the US, no for profit company would bother providing service, as it is wouldn't be profitably - but USPS serves everyone.
The fact that the USPS is currently operating at a loss has a lot to do with a bill that passed in 2006 requiring them to prepay their employee benefits including pensions 50 years in advance.
But they provide that same service reasonably evenly across the whole country, your zip code is the same 'value' as any other. In plenty of remote places you could easily call USPS extremely high quality service, perhaps even delivering by horse which a private company would never do without high cost
> US federal government certainly is not known for providing high quality service at low cost, quite the opposite in fact.
Medicare is a great example to the contrary. They provide healthcare to the sickest groups, and do so with roughly 3x less overhead than the private healthcare industry.
that's because Medicare covers all the old people that actually need healthcare while all the private companies cover much younger and therefore healthier populations
> But there's a recurring theme here: public money enabling private growth
Not in the US. The railroad industry is built on a mountain of bankruptcies, failed mergers, etc. Look up the history of the railroad boom and busts in the US if you aren’t familiar.
I'm confused why you think that private rail owned, operated, and built by private companies is somehow "rent seeking". Amtrak is even only allowed to use their rails by forced act of Congress. If things followed normal commercial rules Amtrak would have no right to use them at all. More so, they operate below the cost of any freight rail of anywhere in the developed world. They're incredibly efficient in operation.
> From 1850 to 1871, the railroads received more than 175 million acres (71 million ha) of public land – an area more than one tenth of the whole United States and larger in area than Texas.
That establishes that they were given land, and a hell of a lot of it. So we're settlers, Ranchers, and individuals. A bass portion of land in the US was handed over to private parties who wanted to put it to use. I don't see how that undermines the idea that they are the rightful owners of it today.
They were giving it in the expectation that they would put in rails to make money for themselves, and as a byproduct, there would be rail service for customers.
Sellers remorse after 150 years is not grounds to claim that they don't actually own it
Purely from a $/tonne/mile perspective, it is a massive success. There is no doubt about that.
However, the technology is literally decades behind compared to the rest of the world. Electrification basically does not exist, and basic safety systems are in their infancy.
Precision Scheduled Railroading has resulted in a system with very little flexibility which makes extremely poor use of the infrastructure available. Working conditions are appalling, and the resulting stress has major safety implications.
Meanwhile, passenger transport - which was the reason they were developed in the first place - has been reduced to a rounding error, and is the laughing stock of the Western world.
Europe transports 35% of its freight by boat, 12% by rail, and 55% by road. The US transports 5% by boat, 11.6% by rail, and 75% by road. The observed success of American freight is primarily due to geographic restrictions: there are virtually zero waterways in the western half, and cross-continent barge transport is impossible. Combine that with a country which is incredibly big and mostly empty, and rail ends up being the only viable method for bulk cargo transport.
The way I see it, US freight is deeply troubled by operating issues, and is only economically successful due to geography making it the only viable option.
We should look at nationalizing the rail lines and then investing in them to accommodate freight and passenger traffic more effectively. Positive Train Control[1] and judicious expansion of switches/bypass lanes should allow us to better saturate the rails so that throughput is maximized.
This could even enable new passenger services other than Amtrak to operate in competition.
Nationalizing them would be a disaster. They were deeply unprofitable until the federal government de-nationalized them after it had nationalized them and practically ruined them in the process of that nationalization. Let's not ruin what good things there are.
Because Conrail was created because the private railway system was collapsing due to mismanagement, and many railroad companies were going bankrupt. After nationalization Conrail quickly turned into a huge success, and was sold off to private investors after a decade for a massive profit.
If anything, privatization was the best thing that had happened to the railways in decades. And that's not exactly a one-time-thing only - the railways were previously also nationalized during WWI, which had a similar success.
You can nationalize the infrastructure without nationalizing the operations upon it.
Many other countries use a system where one government-related entity manages in the infrastructure, and many private companies can pay to operate rail services on that infrastructure.
This would actually allow market competition instead of geographic monopolies.
My intention was to nationalize the rails; the current operators can still do so as private businesses but they now have to share with other operators (including passengers).
After initially privatising everything in the 1990s, which led to cut corners on track/signal maintenance and accidents as a result, Britain nationalised the rail infrastructure -- track, electric catenary, signals, tunnels, bridges and stations.
Companies (private or public) operating trains pay a fee to use the track.
The UK runs one of the worst rail services in Europe[0]. The involvement of the operating companies is a charade with the sole purpose of siphoning public money into private hands.
What value is a private operator adding to the system when tracks, signalling, timetables, and fares are managed by the public body? Especially given they aren't providing the rolling stock themselves.
Note that the private operators did such an awful job of managing timetables and fares that the responsibility was taken from them.
Sorry, I was very ambiguous but I meant only that the public-run infrastructure was working much better than when that was privately run. Britain's railway network is one of the safest in Europe, and it's a very busy network.
I agree the private operators bring nothing. Train tickets are one of the few things that are more expensive in Britain than here in Denmark, and I can't think of anything at all that's better about trains in Britain, other than the more varied scenery.
Extract rent? Seriously? They sell transportation. They face competition from the highway system, which is provided at public expense. Nothing about this looks like rent (even in the economic sense).
Selling transportation doesn't make it not rent extraction: these companies were given the land they operate on, plus government bonds to offset their capital expenses. Most operate as monopolies or duopolies in their regions, which is the efficient condition for rent-seeking behavior.
(The fact that they experience brisk competition from other subsidized forms of transportation doesn't alter this.)
I'm surprised PSR hasn't been mentioned in this. "Precision Scheduled Railroading" primarily means miles-long trains (with locomotives embedded rather than all at the lead end). They can take 10+ minutes to pass at a crossing, which is bad enough, but absent full double tracking, they also don't fit on the passing sidings, so while a passenger train could wait on one to let the freight train pass, the opposite is not possible.
> On the latter point, it asks the board to look at such matters as “how UP has reconciled its decision to implement Precision Scheduled Railroading with its obligations to host intercity passenger trains over the UP network.” It suggests that the board split its proceeding into two phases — an investigative phase to determine the cause of delays, and whether they are due to a failure to provide preference to Amtrak, and a remedial phase to determine possible damages and corrective action. It also offers a broad range of procedural suggestions regarding documents and interviews that should be part of the proceeding.
As a frequent Amtrak passenger, I can attest to the unpunctuality of the Union Pacific and other freight operators. On several occasions we have been delayed by a passing freight train that was an hour or more behind schedule, causing us to miss our scheduled connection. During one such occasion, while traveling on the Coast Starlight from Eugene this summer, I was treated very rudely by the conductor, who kicked me out of the dining car despite having a reservation. Precision scheduled railroading is anything but precise.
The real problem here is that freight trains have so much priority in the US, unlike every other major country in the world.
It doesn't matter how many or what kinds of trains we have. This sort of policy will always makes trains an unreliable and therefore impractical mode of transportation.
And this is a major reason for the US leading the world in carbon consumption per capita.
This isn't true. Amtrak has priority by law over freight in the US as long as they are on time. They don't get priority once they area late. What happens is that Amtrak becomes late and then they lose their slot and become further late.
The problem is that freight transporters are intentionally running trains which are longer than the sidings. Even if an Amtrak train has priority by law, it is - by design - impossible for the freight train to pull over.
The result is that an on-time Amtrak train has to wait for a delayed freight train, because it is physically impossible to do anything else. This of course results in the Amtrak train now being late, through no fault of its own.
It is not impossible to deal with this. The Amtrak train could go onto the siding and then the freight train could back up, allowing the Amtrak train to reenter the main track ahead of the freight train.
> This of course results in the Amtrak train now being late, through no fault of its own.
I'm going to give the tried and true answer everyone receives (at airports at least): it doesn't matter why your late. It's your responsibility. You should've left earlier and predicted the future.
Amtrak should've already built their own rails and should be serving much more of the country. I dont know anyone who can even consider Amtrak for travel.
Honestly we need to build parallel rights of way anyways.
The freight rails are slow and dilapidated. It would make more sense for passenger railways to be separated from freight railways entirely rather than to try and squeeze into inadequate trackage. We don’t try to unload air freight through passenger terminals or vice versa.
That makes sense on some corridors but I'm not sure about the economics of building 2000 miles of dedicated right of way for a train that runs 3 times a week. Maybe if price, reliability, and speed of the service improved to such a degree it could feasibly compete with air and highway travel between those cities.
The good news is that most of the population lives in corridors that would make sense.
The I-5 coast and everything west of I-35 represents most of the US population. In particular, Chicago, Atlanta, and New York form a triangle roughly 700 miles on each side. This is roughly the distance between Beijing and Shanghai, or Tokyo to Fukuoka, both of which see high speed trains regularly making the full journey.
The government frankly doesn't have it in it to do a project like that anymore. Can you imagine the outcry when they have to eminent domain some poor peoples property?
>Can you imagine the outcry when they have to eminent domain some poor peoples property?
No, I can't, but I don't have to imagine the insurmountable resistance when the government merely suggests using eminent domain on a rich person's property.
Besides, poor people don't own property in the US anymore.
They only have de facto priority; officially passenger trains are supposed to be prioritized. This is in fact the basis of the complaint described in the article.
That is just plain wrong. In practice, of the 30+ interstate Amtrak trips I've taken in the past 10 years, the overwhelming majority of them are delayed by freight rail. It is standard operating procedure.
Yes, that's what de facto priority means. Since the railroads operate the lines and the freight trains, they (illegally) give their own freight trains priority over Amtrak passenger trains, which by law are supposed to have priority.
It's actually exactly what de facto means. Amtrak has de jure priority, but freight has de facto priority, because the freight carriers are gaming the system by running over-long trains and other assorted foot-dragging with respect to compliance.
More to the point, as several other comments noted the official policy is to prioritize passenger rail, which clearly wasn’t happening, so hopefully events such as these will begin to change that.
>the official policy is to prioritize passenger rail
Define "official"
>hopefully events such as these will begin to change that.
What events?
If you think this was a rare case, you obviously don't ride Amtrak long distance much. Most interstate Amtrak trips get delayed by freight, and it has been that way for decades.
Sure, but there is no precedent for such regulation as long as the railroads are privately owned by the same corporations that control congress. This is yet another case of HN Utopianism.
Why would there need to be a precedent? The regulation has been in place for forty-five years. It's the law. Congress passed it. The only new aspect is that Amtrak can now request these investigations, where previously it was the sole purview of the Department of Justice, an organization famously known for not being Congress.
Haha wow, like 30% more passengers who are 3+ hours late than are on time (11k 3+ hours late vs. 8k on time). That's impressively bad. In aggregate, 4x as many passengers late as on time.
I have taken one round trip train journey in the last 30 years. The outbound trip made me late for my daughter's wedding because Union Pacific swung so many freight trains in our path that we were 3 hours late
The solution to fixing problems with Amtrak is to privatize it and shut down the unprofitable long distance lines or require states that want them to pay for them. Amtrak is already profitable in areas of high density if they weren't held back by all the unprofitable lines.
This take is very wrong, but it does have a kernel of truth. The unprofitable services Amtrak provides are incredibly necessary for rural communities, but having to operate them is a major drain on Amtrak's resources. IMO, Amtrak's lines in extremely low density areas should be separated from Amtrak's portfolio (not shut down but moved to a separate agency) to allow Amtrack to massively expand service in areas where it could do so properly without having to support tons of inherently unprofitable routes. The east coast specifically should have way more and much higher quality trains than it does.
Do you feel the same way about private highways? All infrastructure is subsidized to hopefully benefit the economy. Obviously no private company would want an unprofitable long distance highway. These arguments mostly just show we have different priorities and you would rather drive or fly and i would rather not. And i would rather not wait 2 hours behind the air mail / freight plane when waiting to take off and i'm guessing you would not either.
The federal highway system funding originated as a method of defense. Unless the military switches to using rail for transport then throwing highway funding into the military budget seems fine to me.
By some estimates, a firefighter costs $120,000 in yearly costs while saving over $500,000 in damages a year.
It's a lot harder to make the ROI claim for highways and roads, especially considering increasing road capacity does not decrease congestion -- added capacity tends to increase demand by over 100% of the difference, as little as 5 years later.
Alternatively, nationalize the rail lines and make UP pay for access. Privatization of critical infrastructure, historically, leads to poor outcomes with profits getting siphoned off in the process.
Rail workers aren’t getting sick days and trains are longer (leading to delays) because of investors squeezing rail infra and those who operate it. Why allow it to continue? The whole “privatizing profits socializing losses and externalities” is getting old, no?
You don't even need to nationalize it. It makes perfect sense for the federal government, or even a large state like California, to simply buy it on the open market, as a hostile takeover. The UPRR is dirt cheap compared to how much it is costing society for the UPRR to exist. We're talking low tens of billions. If the Obama administration had funded a takeover of the UPRR ten years ago it would have slashed the future costs of the Calif. High Speed Rail project.
In a pretty straight-forward way. All their insane demands about how far everything has to be from their rights of way in California's Central Valley is bloating up the cost of the passenger rail project. Ordinary road crossings, instead of having normal dimensions, are all 26 feet above the tops of the rails and have 100 foot clear spans. The "intrusion barrier"—a huge wall between adjacent freight and passenger tracks—is unprecedented anywhere in the world, even in places with shared corridors like France, Germany, and Sweden, and it costs an absolute fortune. Imagine a wall hundreds of miles long and strong enough to deflect a train.
That's on top of the other things that UPRR does, like preventing any semblance of reasonable service between the Bay Area and Sacramento.
My proposal is quite simple. Spin off virtually all of the UPRR into a new operating company with the same name and almost all of the capital assets, but retain the rights of way under Not A Bunch Of Dicks Track Corporation.
> Government support, most especially the detailing of officers from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers – the nation's only repository of civil engineering expertise – was crucial in assisting private enterprise in building nearly all the country's railroads. Army Engineer officers surveyed and selected routes, planned, designed, and constructed rights-of-way, track, and structures, and introduced the Army's system of reports and accountability to the railroad companies. More than one in ten of the 1,058 graduates from the U.S. Military Academy at West Point between 1802 and 1866 became corporate presidents, chief engineers, treasurers, superintendents and general managers of railroad companies. Among the Army officers who thus assisted the building and managing of the first American railroads were Stephen Harriman Long, George Washington Whistler, and Herman Haupt.
> State governments granted charters that created the business corporation and gave a limited right of eminent domain, allowing the railroad to buy needed land, even if the owner objected.
Currently the US trades dollars for real goods. One of the major uses of those dollars, since we don't export nearly enough goods to run balanced trade, is to buy US assets. Do you think that maybe our trade partners will stop accepting those dollars if we start nationalizing companies? At that point, doesn't it seem like maybe the USD will crumble?
Nah, never happens. Where will they go? The yuan? The euro? The ruble? Dysfunctional emerging markets? Being a global reserve currency is as, if not more powerful than, a DoD branch. Lot of capital available to burn, pun intended. Investors still invest in Greece and Italy, for example, and they’ve done far worse economically speaking.
Important to keep in mind this exposure is graded on a curve. You don’t have to be the fastest when the bear is chasing you, just faster than your slowest friend.
Reading my earlier comment, it's too black and white. It'd be another straw. Is it the one that breaks the back? I have no idea. But I don't think it's wise to start nationalizing companies.
If trust in foreign currency holdings declines (say, if we decide to unilaterally cancel other countries' holdings in our currency when we want to punish them), then I'd assume that creditor nations would start looking at replacing some or all of their US treasuries holdings with real assets that carry less counterparty risk. If we start nationalizing onshored assets, then the field of suitable assets starts narrowing a whole lot to portable things like commodities.
We should work very hard to maintain a reputation as a trustworthy counterparty if we want to be able to continue running large deficits.
You should make a case for this, rather than asking other people to make a case against it. We flooded the world with dollars after 2008 and still couldn't manage to get our inflation over 2% until a year or two ago.
I'm just trying to get you all to think a bit about effects before suggesting something as radical (for the US) as nationalizing a company. I think it's fairly obvious that going from being a very business/investor friendly country to one that nationalizes a major company for delaying passengers is going to shake confidence in foreign creditors to the US.
Public land given to them for free with the expectation that they'll maintain their ROW in proper working order and adhere to a certain social contract.
Because the federal government already ordered freight carriers to prioritize Amtrak. This has been on the books for nearly fifty years; over a decade ago deliverables were defined to establish target metrics for this. Sunset Ltd. has not been meeting these requirements and Amtrak is asking for this to be investigated. The rules are already in place.
Since Amtrak is a quasi-public corporation, asking Amtrak to pay commercial lines for preference is equivalent to directing public funds into private pockets for the use of federally-subsidized rails. That's a recipe for grift.
If the rules already in place can be freely ignored by private companies, there's no way Amtrak can ever be taken seriously as a transportation solution. Since it's already policy that it should be a serious contender, it makes sense to enforce the rules trying to further that goal.
> Why doesn't Amtrak simply pay UP adequately to get priority? UP is prioritizing freight because it pays better. Fix that.
Is it really that simple?
Freight trains are _long_, Amtrak passenger trains are relatively short. It's far easier to sideline an Amtrak train to let a multi-mile-long freight train pass than it is to sideline that same freight train for Amtrak to pass.
It's not my area of expertise at all, but I assume there aren't huge quantities of such long parallel rails scattered throughout the network for freight trains to move over and wait.
61 tons of freight per American each year
94 tons of freight per mile for each passenger-mile on rail
1/3 of all export goods move by rail
1.7 trillion ton-miles of freight
40% of US long distance freight by volume uses rail
So you have a problem in that increasing the costs to freight will affect all Americans in making them pay more for goods, whereas it will only benefit those passengers using rail. So politically, this is a tough sell. I think you need to put down dedicated track for passenger rail if you want it to be prioritized in our existing rail system, as it's currently a rounding error compared to freight.
That said, I think you will find that there are transportation corridors where there is the political will to fund laying down dedicated track for passenger rail. The way to think about it is that rail maybe costs $X per mile of track, but provides 100000X benefit for freight, and maybe 10x benefit for passenger traffic, so while you would never prioritize passenger traffic over freight, or even treat them equally, it still makes sense to build dedicated tracks for passenger rail.
These numbers are similarly misleading. Read up on induced demand. Rail passengers in the US are small in number because passenger rail sucks. If it were improved, ridership would go up.
You don't know how much ridership would go up, or if it would go up enough to cover the cost of paying extra for the 94 tons of rail freight to be delayed when you prioritize your one additional passenger.
That's problem -- yes, if you spent $X demand would go up, but would it go up enough to justify spending the $X or not? Merely observing that demand would increase in response to a higher quality of service is not an argument, it's just a truism that doesn't provide any new information.
That is why I said elsewhere on this thread that passenger rail needs its own dedicated track. Because the rail we have is so valuable to freight that it's not plausible that passengers or the general public would be willing to pay the price necessary to deprioritize freight. That price is enormous, but it's much more than the price of building out new dedicated rail just for passengers. Go back and redo your argument from the point of view of whether the increased demand would justify building out new track. If that's not the case, there's no hope of it being large enough to justify reducing the focus on freight. I think, in a few places, it is enough to justify laying down dedicated track. But not in all places.
The interesting part is that freight companies are intentionally running trains longer than the sidings. Amtrak trains are legally supposed to have priority, but they made it physically impossible for freight trains to pull over.
Yep. Amtrak runs the longest passenger train in the world in the Auto Train, traveling the Virginia to Orlando route. It's usually about 45 cars long, while a UP freight train can be 100 cars or more.
I agree that the freight companies need to invest in their tracks and right-of-way if they want to ship more. They need to double-track, electrify, and upgrade bridges & tunnels to handle double-stack container cars. India's dedicated freight corridors are a good example.
1) The federal government gave railroads massive amounts of land completely free of charge.
2) The federal government applied some regulations, including around transporting passengers. The automobile and plane hadn't been invented yet, so it wasn't that oppressive to railroads. Passengers were making them money.
3) The world changed and passenger service became massively unprofitable. Amtrak was formed to keep the trains running without the private railroads having to bear the losses. All Amtrak asked for was a few hours a day of clearance to run their trains.
4) Fast forward to today, and the railroads aren't complying with their obligations, that were granted in exchange for immense value.
A handout and a bailout later, and you want the taxpayers to give the railroads even more money?
(These original benefactors still exist today. Union Pacific was around when this was all happening. The "N" in BNSF is one of the original benefactors as well. It's pretty amazing to see companies around 160 years after their formation. Pretty generous government grants throughout their history didn't hurt.)
1. It’s not like the delays are minor. On the line from Portland to Seattle, it’s common for the train be delayed for multiple hours by freight. In what world can a transit service be considered a viable option when even boarding is 2 hours late? Freight is having a really massive negative impact.
2. Massive amounts of land is surprisingly even an understatement! Union Pacific railroad alone was given 12 MILLION acres in this grant: https://www.loc.gov/item/75690778/.
This is all TIL for me. That pink strip in your map is wild. So these guys got 10 square miles per 1 mile of track. And then they went and leased that land to towns and businesses! All those Western movies finally make sense.
Why 10 miles? We always get treated to 'wild west' stories but it sounds like Washington DC was pretty wild itself. Many steaks were consumed and cigars chomped. Here's your land grant.
Not completely free of charge. The deal was that they had to carry the US mail at a rate that was beneficial to the US government and less than beneficial to the railroads. That added up over a few decades. The railroads bought themselves out of that part of the deal during World War II, when the government was eager to take short-term money even if it was long-term a bad idea.
I've seen one set of calculations that the railroads lost quite a bit of money on the deal. It's been decades since I saw it, though, so I can't give you specifics.
Between usurious property tax at the state level, and the machinations of the former ICC, whatever value that the Railroads got for that land has largely if not completely paid back in public goods. Furthermore those landholdings are largely long gone too.
Consider how long railroads were required to offer service that was unprofitable, underutilized, or forced to price itself in an uncompetitive way - all in the name of the public good.
While I think both BNSF and UP (as well as CSX and NS) have an obligation to make sure Amtrak can run on time an under a reasonable schedule. Also, if the railroads dont like it, the alternative is being forced to resume operating the passenger trains they were operating in 1971, and continue to operate that or a similar network in scale and size for at least 10 years without subsidy.
The interesting thing about Amtrak is, if USPS had continued to route first class mail by train, Amtrak might not exist, it was the removal of the indirect subsidy - which turned passenger trains from a break even proposition, which helped generate goodwill for the company to a solid money loser - at a time when the railroads were least able to afford such things. So in exchange the feds agreed to directly subsidize passenger rail via Amtrak, and the railroads were removed of obligation to run passenger trains. This is the obligation at question in this case.
In any case, I dont think they owe the public something anymore because of those land grants. The debt to us from that has been long paid off.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pacific_Railroad_Acts