The Empire (Corridor) Strikes Back

I had the opportunity this past weekend to take my very first journey along the Empire Corridor, northwards from New York City to Albany, then west as far as Utica. It was a truly enlightening experience in a variety of ways. My westbound train, #49, the Lake Shore Limited, departed 15 minutes behind schedule because an Empire Service train scheduled to depart an hour earlier had broken down inside Penn Station, and we took on their passengers. The Lake Shore Limited, with its consist of Viewliner sleepers and Amfleet II coaches, was not able to accommodate all these passengers comfortably, and was obliged to make local stops to Albany in order to let them off at their destinations. We arrived in Utica exactly one hour behind schedule.

Scheduled to return to New York City once again aboard the Lake Shore Limited train #48, I discovered inside Utica Station that Empire Service train #284 was over an hour late and had not yet even arrived at 1:00pm (scheduled for a 12:04 departure), and my own train was similarly delayed. When they announced that #284 was expected to depart at 2:00 and that #48 was running 90 minutes late, I was rebooked (at no extra cost!) to #284.

For trains to be so reliably unreliable is too significant a blemish on the American transportation network to have been ignored for so long. The problem, as I remarked with sympathetic passengers waiting at Utica, is that there is simply no accountability for these lapses in service. The delays, I am sure, are due to the fact that Amtrak must run its train along privately-owned, one- or two-tracked rail lines shared by freight trains with irregular schedules and higher priority on the right-of-way. That CSX and other private carriers have merely allowed passenger travel on their trackage seems to preclude them from adhering to any standards of passenger rail service, and Amtrak, at the mercy of its far more lucrative landlords and lacking any political authority, is powerless to change that. Can no one answer for this embarrassing service record?

I see two (highly unlikely) solutions to service problems along the Empire Corridor. First, the construction of a dedicated passenger rail line, or enlargement of the right-of-way to three tracks, along much of the Corridor, would allow freight and passenger trains to coexist without getting in each other’s way. The other option, of course, is to put both CSX and Amtrak under a single public directory power charged with coordinating—and enforcing—their schedules. The former would be prohibitively expensive; the latter would be tantamount to regulating the nation’s private railways at the state or federal level and would meet insurmountable opposition at all levels of government. Clearly, for service to improve, a significant change in mindset must be effectuated in the private and public sectors, and at the local, state, and federal levels, all along the Corridor. We must either be willing to invest in an enlarged and capable infrastructure, or to reorganize much of the nation’s rail system from the top down.