As you may have seen, we recently published Episode 3 of our main Reconnect America series. It delves into the creation of Amtrak in 1970 and investigates why Amtrak failed to preserve the robust passenger rail system that it took over from the private sector.
One of the factors we explored was the decision to leave U.S. rail infrastructure under the ownership of freight railroad corporations, who retained responsibility for managing the flow of traffic. As a result, Amtrak trains suffer horrendous delays at the hands of their hosts, who have a vested interest in giving priority to their own trains over Amtrak’s.
The freight railroads, in turn, often blame the problem on a lack of infrastructural capacity, and use the slightest potential increase in Amtrak service as a pretext to extort the public into dumping wildly overinflated sums of money into their capital projects.
Though laws passed between 1970 and 1973 attempted to mitigate this conflict of interest early on, these statutes have practically never been enforced.
But according to Tom White, a veteran railroader with nearly 60 years of experience in the industry, law enforcement is not necessarily the solution we need. And neither, in many cases, is a lack of infrastructural capacity to blame. After all, the U.S. has relatively low traffic density on its rail system, relative to the rest of the world—and in much of the country there is less traffic today than there was for most of the 20th century. Theoretically, there is already more than enough physical capacity for freight and passenger trains to operate over the same system without significant conflicts.
Rather, Tom believes that the deeper problem is a severe loss of knowledge in managing rail traffic—a field called dispatching. As the deregulated freight railroads have been taken over by activist investors who have sought to extract wealth from the industry at any cost, the qualifying standards for railroad dispatchers have been cut to the bone. The ability to plan ahead in order to optimize fluidity is no longer expected or even taught. Tom’s solution, therefore, would be for the Federal Railroad Administration to mandate far more robust training standards, just as the Federal Aviation Administration does for air traffic controllers, and as countless other government agencies do in their own respective fields.
Our Rail Bites series presents you with some of our favorite clips from our amazing guests on Reconnect America. With Rail Bites, you can look forward to more frequent, shorter-form content in between our carefully crafted longer episodes.
Reconnect America is hosted by Bill Moyer, co-author of the book Solutionary Rail: A People-powered Campaign to Electrify America’s Railroads and Open Corridors to a Clean Energy Future. Check out the essays and supplemental posts that complement this podcast HERE.
Learn more, get involved and pitch in to support the work of Solutionary Rail at SolutionaryRail.org. Keep the podcast ads-free and without paywalls by making a tax-deductible donation HERE.
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