Amtrak vs. Freight Trains

Trains magazine columnist Fred Frailey is an unabashed lover of passenger trains. So when he suggests that Amtrak is unfair to the freight railroads whose tracks it uses, passenger train supporters should listen.

Railfans often blame the freight railroads for late Amtrak trains, saying that the railroads should always give passenger trains priority under a 1973 law that states, “Except in an emergency, intercity passenger trains operated by or on behalf of [Amtrak] shall be accorded preference over freight trains in the use of any given line of track, junction, or crossing.” But, as Frailey points out (paywall), that 1973 law may be effectively stealing from the railroads when they are running near or at capacity.

For example, the oil boom is generating huge business for BNSF in western North Dakota. BNSF’s east-west main line across North Dakota has a single track with sidings, which should be able to support around 48 trains a day. But Amtrak’s Empire Builder is scheduled to run at 79 miles per hour, while freight trains typically run at only about 59, and the difference in speed means that the Amtrak train effectively reduces the line’s capacity by two or more freight trains a day.

In 2017, the Empire Builder had one of the best on-time records of any Amtrak train, showing that BNSF has been following the 1973 law. But doing so is clearly costing it potential freight revenue. Frailey thinks that 1973 law is a takings under the Constitution’s property rights clause, and he is only surprised that no railroad has yet challenged it.

In 1973, when the law was passed, the railroads had a huge surplus of capacity. The nation’s railroads had built 254,000 route-miles of rail lines as of 1916, but the opening of the Panama Canal greatly reduced transcontinental rail traffic. Thanks to a regulatory environment that made it difficult for railroads to abandon unproductive rail lines, the country still had well over 200,000 route miles by 1973, an era in which the railways were moving well under a trillion ton-miles of freight per year.

In the years running up to Amtrak, railfans charged that the railroads tried to discourage profitable passenger trains in favor of more profitable freight. To show that railroaders preferred freight over passenger, they liked to quote James J. Hill, builder of the Great Northern Railway, saying, “The passenger train is like a male teat: neither useful nor ornamental.” In fact, there is no evidence that Hill ever said this: the earliest use of the quote I can find is from a 1951 humor book.

“Since the industry has enormous excess capacity by anybody’s standards,” transportation economist George Hilton responded in 1968, “the fact that freight was more profitable than passengers is no explanation” for a supposed executive preference for freight over passengers.

Today, the situation has greatly changed. Thanks to the 1980 deregulation law, railroads have reduced their physical plant to less than 140,000 route miles, while productivity has increased to nearly 2 million ton-miles of freight per year. The railroads might be criticized for jettisoning some of what they thought were excess lines in the 1980s in corridors that turned out to running at capacity in the 1990s and later. But maintaining those lines then and restoring that capacity today are both expensive. In North Dakota, BNSF has to weigh the tens or hundreds of millions it would cost to double-track its lines against the probability that the oil boom will turn into a bust, as it has at least twice in the past.
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James J. Hill did say that “the so-called ‘travelling public’ forms in reality but a small, and the more fortunate class of the community,” while nearly everyone depends on freight. “Hence, justice requires that railway systems . . . should be cautious not to favor passenger traffic at the necessary expense of freight payers.”

These words should be remembered when looking at Amtrak. Like it or not, almost everyone in the United States uses petroleum products, some of which come from North Dakota, in their day-to-day lives, while a vanishingly small percentage of Americans ride the Empire Builder across North Dakota in any given year.

At the opposite end of the scale from BNSF’s North Dakota line is the Raton Pass route in New Mexico, which (as the Antiplanner previously discussed) BNSF no longer uses for freight. As a result, it sees just two trains a day, Amtrak’s east- and west-bound Southwest Chief. In the latest print issue, Trains magazine editor endorses spending the tens or hundreds of millions needed to keep those trains running even though they move only a few hundred people per day.

Frailey himself says that keeping that route would be like pouring “money down a rathole,” but he warns that it is not the only route in danger. The far-more scenic California Zephyr through uses a route through Utah and Colorado that currently sees only a handful of freight trains a day and, says Frailey, is “two mine closings from becoming extinct.” There are alternate routes for both the Southwest Chief and California Zephyr, but BNSF doesn’t want to let Amtrak take away container-train capacity on the alternate Chief route through Amarillo (which sees more than 100 freight trains a day) and Union Pacific probably feels the same about its alternate (and far less scenic) Wyoming route for the Zephyr.

Amtrak has successfully bamboozled many inside-the-beltway policymakers into believing that the railroad’s Northeast Corridor earns a profit, and only those trains in the hinterlands lose money. In fact, as even the Rail Passenger Association (formerly National Association of Railroad Passengers) admits, a proper cost accounting system would reveal that the Northeast Corridor loses a ton of money. RPA’s goal is to defend the long-distance trains, but this raises the question: why are we keeping the passenger trains at all?

Amtrak spends four times as much moving one person one mile as the airlines, and to be at all competitive it requires subsidies that are roughly 30 times as much as the airlines receive (and most airline subsidies go to tiny, out-of-the-way airports, not to the majority of air travelers). Yes, Amtrak trains are scenic and nostalgic, but as I found last year, they are also uncomfortable, the food is lousy, and on at least some trains passengers are likely to be awakened in the middle of the night by jack-booted thugs DEA officials hoping to find large sums of cash they can take through asset forfeiture laws.

The president of the Rail Passengers Association, Jim Mathews, has graciously agreed to comment on my new book, Romance of the Rails, when it is released on October 10. The forum will be livestreamed, so if you can’t be in Washington DC to see it, I hope you will watch it on line.