When you travel by train, stuff happens. On one of my trips, a dining car steward on VIA Rail’s trans-continental train put it rather succinctly: “If you work for the railroad,” he said, ”you gotta be flexible.” Amtrak’s long-distance trains often run late. That’s because they operate on track owned by the freight railroads,…
We all know that over the past several years Amtrak’s On-Time Performance (OTP) has gone from pretty-good to not-so-good to just-plain-awful. The usual reason given for all these late trains is “freight traffic”, but there’s a lot more to it than that. Here’s the short version: For some time, and as prescribed by law, Amtrak…
Don’t look now, but it sure seems as though a lot of attention is starting to focus on Amtrak’s on-time performance. And it’s not just coming from the usual sources: passenger advocacy organizations like the National Association of Railroad Passengers (NARP). There has been a flurry of stories in the print media and a number…