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With less traffic, trains are flying
Amtrak's Coast Starlight, which runs from Los Angeles to Seattle, northbound at San Jose Diridon Station
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TEXT OF STORY
Bill Radke: If you're driving this Labor Day weekend, some good news: gas is a dollar cheaper than a year ago and AAA says there'll be 13 percent fewer cars on the road. Of course, you don't have to worry about either issue if you take the train, which is what reporter Eve Troeh did.
Eve Troeh: For my summer vacation, I climbed aboard the Coast Starlight and rode all the way from Los Angeles to Seattle. The train runs along the Pacific Ocean, through the hills of wine country, past snowy mountains and clear streams.
To me, it sounded relaxing. But most people just asked: How long will that take? Answer: 34 hours. And delays often made the trip even longer. That's earned the Coast Starlight a nickname:
David Warmouth: The "Coast Starlate."
David Warmouth was another passenger. He told me the train was usually late because Amtrak has to pull over for trains owned by Union Pacific or Santa Fe.
Warmouth: Amtrak doesn't own the rails, so the freight traffic had priority.
Last year, the Coast Starlight was late about half the time. No fun for passengers, but not always so bad for train workers. Like Tom, a sleeper car attendant:
Tom: Two, three, four, five, six hours late in each direction. Every day. Everybody wanted to work this train because it was the moneymaker. Overtime!
But lately, the train's been 90 percent on time.
Tom: You know, since the economy's gone bad, there's no freight trains. And without freight trains we run on time.
Freight is down about 18 percent, according to the American Association of Railroads. Which sure helped my ride. When I woke up for my second day on the train, evergreen forests whizzed by all the way to Puget Sound. That evening, we reached the end of the line.
Conductor: Prepare yourself for arrival in the Emerald City of Seattle, Washington. Seattle, Washington, this is it.
We were 40 minutes early. So early, in fact, that my ride wasn't there yet to pick me up.
Waiting in Seattle's King Street Station, I'm Eve Troeh for Marketplace.
Yes, I did talk to several people in the train industry, including the CEO of the American Association of Railroads. This was meant to be a brief feature from the passenger's point-of-view, and there was simply no room or reason to go into the intricate partnerships and deals that did indeed improve performance shortly *before the economy turned downward. Yet a decrease in freight is making that performance much better than the agreements have done alone. Also, don't you think veteran employees have a pretty good idea of what's making a train run on time or late?
Low priority on the lines really magnifies delays such that a minor breakdown can turn into a major delay as the passenger train falls out of its time slot. Since we want to encourage train travel, perhaps our federal government could pass a law that passenger trains have priority over freight. Passenger trains are such a small portion of the track usage that it should not be too hard on the freight trains. Plus the law would apply to all operators so no one company could gain an advantage. Otherwise when the economy picks up... so will the delays on the passenger trains as every maintenance problem gets magnified as the repaired train falls out of it's "time slot".
What a shoddy story. What did you do for research? Ask a train attendant and google "freight train traffic"?
It was more than just freight traffic that was causing the Coast Startlight trouble: It was the UP's merger and acquisition binge of the 90's, which left them vulnerable and with miles of antiquated infrastructure, particularly on the west coast, where the Southern Pacific had been limping along for years.
If you had actually done some reporting on this story, you would have found out that the west coast states, Amtrak, and the Union Pacific have all worked together to make improvements on the tracks, resolve the bottleneck points, and the tighten up the timekeeping.
I realize this was a fluff piece, but business reporting is business reporting - and there's quite a successful government/industry partnership story here.
