Dude, where’s my train? Why freight makes Amtrak late

Like other Amtrak routes, the Cascades run — between Vancouver, British Columbia, and Eugene, Oregon — is often late.

Audrey Lundin of Portland stands on a train platform in Edmonds, Washington, waiting for the southbound Amtrak Cascades. It’s about 45 minutes late.

It is Lundin’s fourth trip on the line that runs between Vancouver, Canada, and Eugene, Oregon, and her first major delay.

It could be worse: Amtrak’s Empire Builder, inbound from Chicago, is about five hours behind schedule.

“I prefer it to driving,” Lundin said. “I do not have to be on the road, navigating traffic and the Seattle roads. And I can read or watch something.”

According to the Washington state Department of Transportation, 47% of Amtrak Cascades trains arrived on time in 2022, with on-time performance rising to 56% in the first nine months of 2023.

“Come on down, folks, come on down!” An Amtrak conductor shouts to hustle boarding passengers along after the train rolls up and perhaps make up a little of its lost time.

Late is par for the course for Amtrak trains nationwide. The passenger rail company blames illegal interference from freight trains for most of its passengers’ often-substantial delays.

Rail advocates say enticing more passengers to take a train instead of driving or flying — and making a dent in the heavy climate impact of American transportation — will require measures to reduce those delays and boost train travel’s speed and reliability.

Riding the rails causes less climate damage than driving alone or flying.

But in Washington state, rail service can be slow and unreliable, in part because freight trains often get to go first.

Most Amtrak trains run on someone else’s property. The Amtrak Cascades rolls above Canadian National Railway tracks in British Columbia, BNSF Railway tracks in Washington, and Union Pacific Railroad tracks in Oregon.

It might seem logical that Amtrak often gets second-class treatment, having to yield the right of way to the property owners’ trains.

But in the United States, freight railroads are not only required to let passenger trains use their tracks, they’re required under federal law to give passenger trains priority when dispatchers have to juggle passenger and freight trains.

“The law is very clear,” said Sean Jeans-Gail with the Rail Passengers Association in Portland. “Amtrak is given priority dispatching preference, and the freights have been violating that with impunity for the last decade.”

The Amtrak Improvement Act of 1973 states, “Except in an emergency, intercity and commuter rail passenger transportation provided by or for Amtrak has preference over freight transportation in using a rail line, junction, or crossing.”

“It’s not like the highway system. You don’t have the privilege or the luxury of passing lanes,” explained Jason Biggs, interim head of the rail, freight, and ports division at the Washington state Department of Transportation. “There are sidings. There are areas where there’s double track, some areas where they’re single track. So, it has to be a very deliberate dispatching and management of rail traffic that’s out there.”

Tune in to railroadradio.net, and you can hear BNSF dispatchers juggle freight and passenger traffic in real time.

“You’re going to be waiting to cross over a little bit, Amtrak, coming up to Edmonds,” a BNSF dispatcher told one Amtrak Cascades crew on Tuesday.

Another dispatcher gave Amtrak’s Empire Builder a green light to enter Seattle’s King Street Station, its final destination.

“After stopping, AMTK 319 at King Street has authority to pass signal displaying ‘stop’ from Lead Two to King Five, over,” the dispatcher said.

Jeans-Gail said the 50-year-old federal law that lets passenger trains go first has almost never been enforced.

“I guess I can only say if you have a highway with a speed limit, but absolutely no enforcement and absolutely no penalty for breaking the speed limit, you shouldn’t be surprised when people speed,” Jeans-Gail said.

Amtrak spokesperson Kelly Just declined to be interviewed, but the passenger rail corporation has urged Congress to let it sue the freight rail companies over the delays. Freight railroads have lobbied against that idea.

BNSF Railway spokesperson Lena Kent did not reply to an interview request. Spokesperson Jessica Kahanek with the American Association of Railroads, whose members include both freight railroads and Amtrak, declined an interview request.

“There is no…