Have you seen the oil trains? There are lots of them. Three locomotives hauling one hundred or more hulking, black tank cars filled with crude oil. They’re coming from Canada or from the huge new Bakken oil fields in North Dakota, and they’re heading for refineries scattered across the U.S. And they are a very…
Amtrak has added between 90 minutes and three hours to the schedule of the Empire Builder in an effort to regain some semblance of on-time performance. As we all know, that train has been running many hours late because of freight congestion occurring across North Dakota. On March 27, the St. Paul Star-Tribune ran a…
Are you sick of reading about the problems the Empire Builder is having? Not half as sick as I am writing about them, I can assure you. The thing is, it’s an intolerable situation and it just cannot go on. But it doesn’t seem to be improving. There are four Empire Builder consists somewhere on…
Amtrak’s Empire Builder has had a miserable winter. The polar vortex, heavy snow, and a huge increase in freight traffic has resulted in many delays of many hours. The worst area has proven to be in North Dakota, specifically the 120-mile stretch between Devils Lake and Minot. Things got so completely hopeless a couple of…