Opinion

Amtrak has priority over freight — but passengers don’t benefit

Passengers at the Martinez Amtrak Station rush to their Zephyr train, though often they get sidetracked and wait while freight trains get the right-of-way. Passengers at the Martinez Amtrak Station rush to their Zephyr train, though often they get sidetracked and wait while freight trains get the right-of-way. Photo: Brant Ward / The Chronicle Photo: Brant Ward / The Chronicle Image 1 of / 5 Caption Close Amtrak has priority over freight — but passengers don’t benefit 1 / 5 Back to Gallery

Most any repeat Amtrak customer knows the ritual. You’re clipping along nicely on the rails when the engineer applies the brakes and puts the train onto a side rail. Then in five minutes — or maybe 30 — you get to watch a line of boxcars roll triumphantly past your window. That’s right: a freight train got priority once again and you’re going to be late.

This “Amtrak two-step” has become a major contributor to passenger rail’s continuing bad reputation. It may also be illegal, and the federal government has had the power all along to stop it.

First, some history. When America’s railroads were in wretched condition 40 years ago, Congress did two important things to save them. The first was to consolidate passenger service into a quasi-federal entity called Amtrak. The second was to begin a process of deregulating the freight rail business, which has since prospered wildly.

Big carriers like BNSF, Union Pacific and Norfolk Southern are required under a 1973 law to make way for Amtrak trains. Yet the freights often treat Amtrak not like a visiting royal but a drunk party crasher. Dispatchers habitually make passenger trains wait for the “hotshot” trains carrying coal or liquid crude, even though the federal law says clearly: “Amtrak has preference over freight transportation in using a rail line, junction, or crossing.”

A potential Amtrak renaissance is buried in that one sentence — which should carry the force of law because it is the law — but is currently a meaningless blandishment because the Surface Transportation Board has no staff or incentive to crack down on Fortune 500 companies with political clout. Amtrak tried to get confrontational about this in 2012 when it complained about the Canadian National Railway, only to bring on a year and a half of talks that went nowhere. A more recent complaint against Norfolk Southern is also likely to end with murky outcomes and frustration.

A weakling Amtrak kowtowing to bullying freights is a daily embarrassment, especially when the public is eager to find alternative means of travel amid the general unpleasantness of aviation. Amtrak set a record of 31.4 million passengers carried last year, but saw its on-time performance plunge from 83 percent to 42 percent.

That’s right: Amtrak is late more than half the time and the Capitol Limited from Chicago to Washington arrived on time an abysmal 1.6 percent in July. Northern California got comparatively lucky — the Coast Starlight and Capitol Corridor trains were on time a respective 85 and 95 percent in the same month. But it’s still a dismal show by international standards and no way to attract long-term customers.

What can an average sidetracked passenger do? Don’t sit there and fume. Tweet your congressional representative from your seat and insist they enforce their own laws (I suggest the hashtag #Amtrak2step) and stop rolling over for the big railroads. The situation, according to one observer, is like having a Clean Water Act on the books but no EPA to investigate egregious polluters.

Unless passengers make noise — not to the helpless conductor but to elected officials — the problem is going to get even worse. Freight trains have become the tool of choice to haul crude oil out of the Bakken Shale in North Dakota, straining network capacity to historic limits (it now takes a train an average of 30 hours just to get through the colossal spaghetti bowl of Chicago). Utilities are also complaining of late coal trains, which results in idled power plants.

Yes, American cargo railroads owe it to their shareholders to maximize their deliveries and their timetables have been under stress for years. Scooting over a mile-long coal train for a half-full Amtrak is at best an act of corporate goodwill. Without real penalties for disobedience, widespread violations are almost a law of nature.

Though freight railroads might holler and cry poverty, it is time to uphold the law and recognize that passenger rights trump Big Coal and Big Oil.

Tom Zoellner, an associate professor of English at Chapman University, is the author of “Train: Riding the Rails that Created the Modern World, from the Trans-Siberian to the Southwest Chief.” To comment, submit your letter to the editor at www.sfgate.com/submissions/#1