[ak217]

I once was on an Amtrak train that was delayed by 6 hours because of this crap. It started with a 2 hour delay while they were hooking up someone's private car, and missed its timeslots on the rest of the route, then the crew timed out, and the delays snowballed (and the train had a skeleton crew for the rest of the trip).

A few years ago, they banned this practice because of these types of issues. If they're reintroducing it, get ready for more delays and more completely unreliable Amtrak service.

[kccqzy]

I don't think you need to worry.

From https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-03-25/can-you-b...

> One year ago, Amtrak issued a policy notice saying it would make drastic cuts in operating charter services run by private owners. “These operations caused significant operational distraction, failed to capture fully allocated profitable margins, and sometimes delayed our paying customers on our scheduled trains,” read the notice from March 2018. “There may be a few narrow exceptions to this policy. ... Otherwise, one-time trips and charters are immediately discontinued.”

[ak217]

Yeah, that's the "banned this practice" change that I was talking about.

The documents in the link that the post is about are from 2021/2022 though. So they must have un-banned it. The "guidelines" document at https://www.amtrak.com/content/dam/projects/dotcom/english/p... lists 44 Amtrak stations throughout the US where this practice is allowed (and likely to continue to disrupt schedules for regular passengers).

It's infuriating actually. There are plenty of historic railroad societies that own track around the US where people can take their railcars to be driven around. Amtrak has a credibility problem because of its reputation for being unreliable, and this affects public perception of passenger rail transit overall and how worthwhile it is to invest in it.

[differentview97]

I don't understand why Amtrak - the only operator on its own tracks - is unable to make it work, meanwhile in EU you have literally thousands of private operators operating their own trains as well as combined multi-owner trains riding on tracks belonging to dozens of owners... and it works fairly well, there certainly are no 6+ hours delays, at most an hour or so for the whole multi-state 1000km trip.

[czinck]

> the only operator on its own tracks

Amtrak only owns ~630 miles of tracks out of the 21,000 it uses, and basically all of that 630 is in the North East. This is definitely Amtrak's best area, although that's partially because of the amount of people going between Boston/NYC/Philadelphia/DC; the rest of the US doesn't have as many big cities that close together.

> multi-state 1000km trip

If you get on I-5 North in Los Angeles and start driving, 1000km later you'll still be in California.

[Aloha]

On the small portion of the US railway network that Amtrak owns, its quite successful, the Northeast Corridor is most likely profitable (and probably the only profitable part of the Amtrak system).

[ak217]

Europe has dedicated infrastructure for intercity trains used by people who need to get there on time. The US does not (outside the NEC).

Can you imagine a TGV or ICE stopping to hook up a private car?

[differentview97]

Sure I can. On the same track you have many different companies operating their own lines, combined multi-operatoe lines, as well as irregular connections (again single and multiple operators combined).

I've seen multiple operators (some of them entirely private, some entirely state-owned corporations, some combinations) combine their trains on an EuroCity-labelled line more than a few times.

I have a friend who is working on founding his own train company and he's actually providing services to the state-owned corporations where they have him operate their wagons in his combined train, with his own locomotive. He operated a major intercity line several times this way (they use his service when there's a problem on the regular route) - and it stopped to recombine several times. I've personally been on a train ride that combined his private for-fun party wagon with an EC train.

[ak217]

It sounds like your sentiment is part of the same problem in Europe - I mean you said it yourself, you saw delays on these combo trains.

Luckily Europe has high speed rail which does not allow your friend's party wagon to disrupt the schedule. You might imagine a TGV or ICE picking it up, but I don't think it will ever happen.

[pionar]

New York to LA is almost 5 times that length. So your "at most an hour or so" can feasibly snowball to 6+ hours.

[philwelch]

When Richard Anderson was the CEO, Amtrak was on track to achieve profitability by 2020. Then the pandemic happened, and then the bipartisan infrastructure bill basically removed all the language from the law that authorizes Amtrak about minimizing the cost to the taxpayer, so that never came to fruition.