Schedule Padding: The On-Time Illusion

Three years ago, when I took the Coast Starlight from Seattle to Los Angeles, we didn’t pull into LA’s Union Station until 4:00 in the morning … seven hours late.

Amtrak’s long-distance trains operate on track owned and controlled by the freight railroads. They are supposed to be given priority, but dispatchers for the Union Pacific Railroad had constantly shunted us off onto sidings to wait while their freight trains rumbled by. That was not an unusual occurrence back then, especially on UP routes. These days, extensive track repair work being done with stimulus money is the cause of delays on many of Amtrak’s routes.

Delays like those are not Amtrak’s fault, but put Amtrak between a rock and hard place nonetheless. Knowing they have to give passengers some kind of realistic idea for arrival times, they did the only thing the could do … they padded some of their schedules, arbitrarily adding time between stations along the way to allow for likely delays.

A good example is the current timetable for the Sunset Limited, which runs three times a week between New Orleans and Los Angeles.

The westbound Sunset, Train # 1, originates in New Orleans and is scheduled to depart at 11:55 a.m., arriving at it’s first stop in Schriever, Louisiana, at 1:25 p.m. It covers those 56 miles in 90 minutes.

But to allow for delays that the eastbound train may have had after leaving Los Angeles, that same timetable shows Train # 2 leaving Schriever at 12:03 p.m. and arriving in New Orleans at 2:55 p.m.

See? The eastbound Sunset is allowed almost three hours to cover the same 56 miles.

I’m glad to say that Amtrak’s on-time performance has improved a lot over the past year or so. That’s partly because the volume of freight traffic is down due to the economy and partly because the Obama Administration stepped up pressure on the freight railroads.

One result of that improvement: Amtrak has since shaved a full hour off the Sunset’s schedule. And, when I rode to Coast Starlight about six weeks ago, we were an hour early into Los Angeles. How about that!