Freight Schedules

Personal experience tells me that Amtraks get most of the breaks. Freight trains more likely than not will sit in a siding for an hour or more to avoid delaying a passenger train for a couple of minutes. But, sometimes they do get delayed, and then we get to listen to them whine about getting an approach or having to touch the brake.
Does anyone actually know what the exact incentives are that Amtrak pays for on time arrivals?

10more years wrote:Personal experience tells me that Amtraks get most of the breaks. Freight trains more likely than not will sit in a siding for an hour or more to avoid delaying a passenger train for a couple of minutes. But, sometimes they do get delayed, and then we get to listen to them whine about getting an approach or having to touch the brake.
Does anyone actually know what the exact incentives are that Amtrak pays for on time arrivals?

I can't recall what the on time pecentage had to be, but I heard from a reliable source that the CN gets $100,000/month bonus if that on time performance is met.

As for me sitting in the hole waiting on a people train, I'm all for it. There's no incentive for us to get the trains over the road anymore.

Here's a textbook example I saw on a forum occasionally visited by dispatchers a year or two ago

Assume a single-track railroad with "control points" ---- all passing sidings of sufficient capacity, except the end points, named alphabetically from east to west:

Alpha (end point)
Bravo (siding)
Charlie (siding)
Delta (siding)
Easy (siding)
Fox (siding)
Golf (end point)

Now assume three conflicting moves

Number 1 (Amtrak passenger = 75 mph = westbound, approaching Bravo)

Number 22 (TOFC/COFC = 60 mph = eastbound, approaching Easy)

Number 402 (coal drag = 30 mph = eastbound, approaching Delta)

Under the traditional timetable/train order method of operation, both eastbounds would immediately take siding and the Amtrak train would get top priority. The coal drag would likely not move until both "superior" trains had passed.

But under present day conditions, schedule commitments or crew-time concerns may argue in favor of holding the Amtrak move at Charlie until the TOFC move overtakes the coal train, and allowing the two highest-priority moves to meet at Charlie, with a higher probability of delay to the pasenger move. This also reduces the total delay to the lowest-rated freight.

In the real world, the speed disparity between high- and low-rated freight moves has diminished somewhat over the years, so I don't believe that this is as much a concern as in the days of Form 19 and Rights of Trains (the reference work for train dispatchers). But I do believe it shows how much room for argument, and the definition of priorities, exists with regard to this issue.

2nd trick op wrote:In the real world, the speed disparity between high- and low-rated freight moves has diminished somewhat over the years, so I don't believe that this is as much a concern as in the days of Form 19 and Rights of Trains (the reference work for train dispatchers). But I do believe it shows how much room for argument, and the definition of priorities, exists with regard to this issue.

The speed differential between freight and passenger has also shrunk. Passenger once routinely ran at 79mph. The freights were allowed to remove passenger optimized curve elevations, and it was all down hill from there for Amtrak.