Why are America’s trains so slow?

A brief historical inquiry.

The current state of railroad technology in the U.S. (Chris Harte via Wikimedia Commons)

Anyone who has sat on an Amtrak train as it idles at a station or crawls around a curve has probably considered the following questions:

Why are trains in America so damn slow? And how can we make them go faster?

A new report by Nolan Hicks, a research fellow at the NYU Marron Institute’s Transit Costs Project, answers both of those questions. The solutions for speeding up train travel make up the meat of the report. You can read all about the glories of electrified trains and level boarding platforms in my CityLab story from last week.

But the first question, the why, is just as important. Deep in his report, Hicks discusses the political and economic forces that left America’s passenger rail network in such a sorry state. His work dovetails with my own historical research on this subject for my forthcoming book, The Unfinished Metropolis. It’s a story that deserves more public attention. We’ll never have faster trains if we can’t reckon with how trains got so slow in the first place.

A century ago, railroads in America and western Europe were of similar quality. In many ways, the U.S. actually had a more advanced network. America’s art deco “streamliners” were the fastest trains in the world, connecting cities like Chicago and Milwaukee in less time than today’s Amtrak.

But even before World War II, America’s railroad companies had largely stopped investing in innovation due to a combination of greedy shortsightedness and overly burdensome regulations. From that point on, the industry has been focused on milking their existing track and infrastructure for all they’re worth.

After Amtrak was created in 1971, the railroad companies were able to concentrate all of their energies on freight, optimizing their infrastructure for that purpose. The railroads proceeded to rip out rails wherever possible in order to reduce maintenance costs, providing fewer passing tracks for passenger trains to get around long, slow freight trains. They retained low-tech signaling systems, and invested little in fencing or grade separation, ensuring that no train can travel particularly fast. And they have remained committed to diesel trains, despite the many advantages of electrification.

It didn’t have to be this way. “The infrastructure we have inherited, had we consistently upgraded and funded it like the Europeans have done with theirs, would allow many old-mainline U.S. cities to deliver passenger rail service that rivals what’s found abroad,” Hicks writes in the report.

The Northeast Corridor is the exception that proves the rule. This publicly owned stretch of tracks is the only railroad in America that has received consistent upgrades and investment over the past 70 years. It features electrified trains, level boarding platforms, and long sections that are totally grade-separated. Cumulatively, these attributes make passenger service fast, frequent and reliable.

The Northeast Corridor is about as good as a middling European or East Asian intercity line. In most other countries, where the track network is publicly owned, planners have been able to better balance the needs of passenger and freight rail. They’ve steadily modernized their legacy infrastructure, kitting out their century old railroads with modern technology. The U.S., by contrast, let the vast majority of its legacy rail infrastructure sit fallow.

There was a brief window, during Amtrak’s early years, when the federal government funded passenger rail research and development that promoted the kind of infrastructure upgrades seen on the NEC. Federal grants helped pay for improvements to several Amtrak lines, as well as the electrification of long stretches of the Long Island Railroad and Metro North in New York.

But then the Reagan Administration defunded passenger rail R&D. Meanwhile, the newly deregulated freight rail industry began flexing its muscles. As business and profits increased, the railroads became more territorial over their tracks. Passengers would need to take a back seat to freight.

With diminished planning capacity, and a stronger adversary in the freight railroads, transportation agencies narrowed their focus. Passenger rail planning “has been largely confined to two different service types,” Hicks writes. “First, low-frequency diesel service that operates on existing rights-of-way with theoretical top speeds of between 80-110 mph, speeds rarely reached because of diesel’s poor performance. Second, greenfield high-speed rail projects, which boast top speeds of up to 220 mph.”

In this environment, planners’ imagination has been constrained to leaving train service more or less as it is on existing track, or pursuing fantastically expensive high-speed rail projects that would appear to bypass conflict with the freight railroads. (This doesn’t always work: In Shafter, California, freight railroad BNSF forced California High-Speed rail to make expensive improvements to freight tracks that would run parallel to the high-speed line.)

With this bifurcated vision, planners have completely overlooked the obvious middle path, Hicks writes:

Three significant studies of major inter-city rail corridors — Chicago to St. Louis, Chicago to Detroit and New York City to Albany — did not evaluate electrification or universal installation of high-level platforms as ways to boost performance using existing rights-of-way. Documents show that electrification in one of those major studies was only viewed to deliver substantial gains if train top speeds exceeded 125mph. Level boarding was viewed as a nice-to-have that improved accessibility and reliability, instead of an essential tool to speed service.

It’s worth dwelling on the significance of this finding. In studying how to improve other lines, planners wouldn’t even consider replicating what works on the NEC, the nation’s one really successful passenger train line. That’s a shanda.

The tracks that are already in the ground are the arteries that sustained the cities of the Northeast and Midwest during their most prosperous era. Trains connected thriving mid-sized cities to each other and to regional hubs. On some corridors, there used to be four or even six tracks running in parallel. Many of those rails have been ripped out, but there’s room to reinstall them to give passenger trains a fast track. Combined with electrification and level boarding, these investments could make trains faster than driving or flying at a much lower cost than greenfield high-speed rail.

Hicks modeled what it would look like for New York State to use this infrastructure to its full potential: “Twelve trains a day between New York City and Syracuse would be worth 36 new flights a day between the cities; ten trains a day between Buffalo and New York would be worth roughly 30 new flights.” Those trains would also be two to three hours faster than current Amtrak travel times.

Imagine the same deal on the Chicago-Ann Arbor-Detroit corridor, or Chicago-Springfield-St. Louis, or Pittsburgh-Harrisburg-Philadelphia.

One can think of worse ways to reinvigorate the heartland.