Amtrak spars with freight train industry over rules of the railroad
Amtrak spars with freight train industry over rules of the railroad
In late July, the Department of Justice took up a cause it hadn’t touched since the late 1970s: It sued a freight railroad for delaying Amtrak trains.
In the lawsuit, the DOJ alleges that on tracks controlled by Norfolk Southern, the railroad frequently delays Amtrak passenger trains.
The suit is focused on Amtrak’s route between New York City and New Orleans, but it touches on what’s been a fundamental issue from the very beginning for this country’s main provider of passenger rail: Amtrak runs mostly on private freight rail tracks. Legally, it’s supposed to get preference over freight trains, but often it doesn’t. In 2023, Amtrak said, freight lines ignoring this law led to over 900,000 minutes, or a year and a half, of delays.
So why is Amtrak set up this way? To understand that, we have to look back before the passenger rail organization was founded in 1970, when private freight rail companies in the U.S. were required to offer passenger service.
“It became clear that the situation that existed then, which was that the freight railroads were losing enormous amounts of money on passenger service, that that was not viable,” said Louis Thompson, who’s held many positions in the rail world over the years, including at the U.S. Department of Transportation.
By the 1950s and ’60s, Thompson said, passenger rail was losing business to interstate highways and airlines.
“So, a small team of people, of which I was a member at DOT, went through the options for what could be done,” he said. “And that eventually led to the creation of Amtrak.”
The plan: Amtrak would take over passenger rail service from the freight companies, freeing them of this money-losing business. But passenger trains would keep running on the same tracks.
“It was always passenger service operating on the tracks they had always operated on, which was the freight railroad tracks,” Thompson said.
Amtrak would pay the freight companies to use their tracks, and in return, passenger trains would get “preference.” That meant that in most circumstances freight companies would have to let Amtrak through before a freight train.
“Initially, the freight railroads were more than happy with the arrangements because in the 1970s, it was kind of the nadir of the rail industry in the United States,” said Albert Churella, a history professor at Kennesaw State University in Georgia. Many freight companies at that time were in or nearing bankruptcy, he said. They didn’t have enough freight business, and they were trying to maintain more track than they needed.
“There was substantial excess capacity, and so adding even a few Amtrak passenger trains was basically generating a lot of revenue with very little added cost,” Churella said.
Then came the wave of deregulation of the 1980s and a law called the Staggers Act.
“The Staggers Act deregulated the railroads,” Churella said. “It incentivized competition and really saved the railroad industry from collapse.”
The law allowed railroads to abandon those tracks they weren’t using much. And eventually, they started hauling a lot more freight. So, eventually that excess capacity disappeared.
“Instead, the railroads are capacity strapped, which makes it more difficult for Amtrak trains to operate in a timely manner,” Churella said.
And here’s where that issue of “preference” for Amtrak comes back. There are now fewer tracks with more freight on them, “and freight makes a lot more money than Amtrak pays to the companies for trackage rights,” said Elizabeth Deakin, a professor emerita at the University of California, Berkeley. “The result is that they basically ignore the rule and go ahead and give preference to freight trains.”
The freight industry has argued that the law does not mean Amtrak has “absolute” preference at all times. But Amtrak has complained to federal regulators about delays. Now, the Department of Justice is suing, and Deakin said those actions could send a message to the freight industry: “‘Hey listen, this is actually a law in the books, and you need to pay attention.’”
In theory, she said, having freight companies take Amtrak’s preference rights more seriously could lead to better service and potentially more passengers for Amtrak.
“One of the things Amtrak’s trying to do is to grow,” said Nicholas Little, director of railway education at Michigan State University.
Amtrak got billions of dollars from the 2021 Bipartisan Infrastructure Law. It’s hoping to use that to start up new routes and add more frequent service to others. Little said that underscores the importance of getting more legal clarity around the rules of the railroad.
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