Why Are American Passenger Trains Slow? - American Affairs Journal

In the 1950s, the Milwaukee Road’s Olympian Hiawatha carried passengers from Minneapolis to Chicago in roughly seven hours. Today, Amtrak’s Empire Builder covers that same distance in just under eight. The New York Central once ran forty-two daily passenger trains between Buffalo and Cleveland, with the 187-mile trip taking three hours. Today, Amtrak’s Lake Shore Limited covers the same 187 miles in three and a half hours, if it’s on time, which it often isn’t. And the New York–Montreal run took nine hours in 1940; today’s Adirondack takes over thirteen.

These are particular examples of a general problem. Across the American rail network, passenger trains run slower today than they did before the Second World War. What happened?

None of the obvious explanations, like underinvestment in rail assets or the ubiquity of car culture, solve the puzzle. If car culture were determinative, we cannot explain why Europe maintains faster rail service than the United States, even though 74 percent of European intercity trips are taken by automobile, only modestly below America’s 85 percent. And political will cannot be the binding constraint either, since bipartisan infrastructure bills consistently include rail funding, but none have reversed the decline.

These explanations fail because they assume something has gone wrong. If we start instead with the premise that something has gone right, the puzzle solves itself. American passenger trains are slow because the United States established a framework after 1970 that made optimization for freight service inevitable. Private railroads, freed from mandatory passenger service, rationally invested in what paid: moving cargo. That optimization succeeded spectacularly: today, America moves over five thousand ton-miles of freight per person annually by rail, a rate nine times that of Europe’s and fifty-four times Japan’s.

Put another way, the United States has excellent intercity rail service . . . for freight. The United States features the most productive freight railroad in the world, and by optimizing for that, it has chosen not to pursue passenger speed. Doing both simultaneously on shared infrastructure is difficult, if not impossible. Four interlocking barriers—incentive structures, infrastructure standards, regulatory requirements, and operational arrangements—keep passenger speeds low: not by accident, but by design.

The “America is behind Europe on trains” narrative compares visibly mediocre service for passengers but ignores invisibly great service for cargo. Instead of asking why America lags Europe on passenger rail, we should be asking ourselves whether America can have better passenger rail and whether it should want to.

Why America Favors Freight

American passenger rail reached its apex in the 1920s through the 1940s. In 1920, railroads carried over 1.2 billion passengers annually across a network exceeding 250,000 route-miles. The great “limiteds”—the 20^th Century Limited between New York and Chicago, the Super Chief to Los Angeles, the California Zephyr through the Rockies—offered speed, comfort, and frequency that no other mode could match. Railroads competed fiercely on service quality: faster schedules, finer dining cars, more luxurious sleeping accommodations.

We can catch glimpses of this prestige in the movies of the day. Marilyn Monroe played a glamorous musician who thinks nothing of taking the train from Chicago to Florida in Some Like It Hot (1959); another screwball comedy, Twentieth Century (1934) is set almost entirely on its namesake train. The premise of the noir thriller Double Indemnity (1944) is that train travel was so safe that an insurance policy would pay twice over if the insured happened to die on such a trip.

Looking back through rose-tinted glasses, it’s easy to miss that rail’s dominance rested on the absence of alternatives. Long-distance automobile travel in this era meant two-lane roads, unpredictable conditions, and days of driving for journeys that a train could complete overnight. Similarly, commercial aviation barely existed. The first transcontinental passenger flights came only in the late 1930s, required multiple stops, and cost far more than rail.

This was not a stable equilibrium. The Interstate Highway System, authorized in 1956 and substantially complete by the late 1960s, made long-distance automobile travel fast, comfortable, and predictable. Jet aviation, commercially viable from 1958, collapsed the premium long-haul market almost overnight: while rail travel still led aviation in the mid-1950s, by 1965, Americans were traveling four times as many miles by air as they were by intercity rail. The train’s competitive niche, faster than driving and cheaper than flying, disappeared when highways made driving faster and jets made flying cheaper. Rail passenger numbers fell by half between 1945 and 1960, then halved again by 1970.

Railroads responded rationally: they exited a business that was bleeding money.

By 1970, private railroads were hemorrhaging cash on passenger service and were legally obligated to sustain those losses, courtesy of Interstate Commerce Commission regulations that prevented route abandonment without regulatory approval. If something cannot continue forever, it will stop, and it began to stop that year with the Penn Central bankruptcy, then the largest in American history. Unable to deny the obvious, Congress faced a choice: let passenger rail die entirely or create a public entity to preserve it. The Rail Passenger Service Act of 1970 chose preservation. Congress declared that “modern, efficient, intercity railroad passenger service is a necessary part of a balanced transportation system” and created a new National Railroad Passenger Corporation, soon branded “Amtrak,” to provide it.

The design was clever: relieve the freight railroads of their passenger losses, consolidate the remaining service under professional management, and give the new corporation the tools to succeed. Amtrak would not only have statutory rights to operate over any freight railroad’s tracks at incremental cost, but also legal preference in dispatching; its trains would “go first.” The corporation was structured as a for-profit enterprise, not a permanent ward of the state. Many supporters believed that if passenger trains were just freed from hostile freight railroad management, consolidated into a coherent national network, and marketed to the public, they could pay their own way. At the time, the vision was plausible: twenty of the twenty-six railroads still operating passenger service joined immediately. Amtrak’s first chairman promised that “continuing improvements will attract hundreds of thousands of people who have not recently—or ever—relied on railroad transportation.” The new corporation’s slogan captured the ambition: We’re making the trains worth traveling again.

The problem was that Amtrak would do all this on track that it did not own. This is the heart of the sorry state of American passenger rail speed today.

Freed from passengers after 1970, the freight railroads invested in infrastructure suited to their core business: heavier axle loads (standard freight cars now carry 286,000 pounds), longer trains (averaging 6,600 feet and sometimes exceeding three miles), and increased vertical clearances for double-stack container cars. These investments transformed American freight rail into something without parallel elsewhere in the world.

The numbers are stark. American freight railroads hold more than 40 percent modal share for freight movement measured in ton-miles, more than any other mode. For contrast, European rail holds roughly 6 percent modal share. Worse, to move the same tonnage, European railroads require seven times as many trains as their American counterparts. North American freight rail rates are among the lowest in the world, with shippers in the United States paying an average of 4.66 cents per revenue ton-mile, half of what shippers in Germany pay. American freight railroads are profitable and largely self-financing; European freight rail depends heavily on state-funded infrastructure and, in many countries, direct operating support.

This divergence was not an accident but reflects the logic of ownership. European railways, mostly state-owned, never stopped optimizing for politically visible passenger service. But after 1970, American railroads, privately owned and profit-seeking, optimized for freight efficiency. Each system reflects pragmatic adaptation to different ownership structures, population densities, and economic geographies.

The American choice made sense given American conditions. The geography here favored freight: vast distances between population centers, bulk commodity production (grain, coal, minerals) in the interior requiring long-haul transport to coastal ports, and low population density that makes frequent passenger service uneconomical outside a few corridors. Ownership structures favored freight: private railroads answering to shareholders had to earn returns on capital, and that meant maximizing returns from freight, since Amtrak had assumed responsibility for passengers. Competition favored freight: trucking could not and cannot match rail’s cost advantage for bulk commodities over continental distances. American freight railroads move cargo at roughly one-quarter the cost per ton-mile of trucking; for bulk goods over long distances, rail has no effective competitor.

Given different conditions in Europe, Europeans made different choices. Geography there favors passengers: shorter distances between major cities, higher population density, and an extensive coastline that made coastal shipping competitive for freight. Ownership favored passengers: state-owned railways accountable to politicians naturally chose to serve citizens, not shareholders, meaning that passenger service was politically visible and salient in a way that freight was not. And competition favored passengers: high fuel taxes made driving expensive, and rail remained competitive with air for journeys of two hundred to six hundred kilometers where travel times between city centers favored trains over the airport-to-airport-plus-security-ritual of flying.

Neither continent made an obviously wrong choice; each optimized for its comparative advantage. The United States, and Canada too, has organized its intercity rail network for freight service, which in practice has meant discouraging passenger service. Has anything changed since 1970 that might allow us to have both?

The answer, unfortunately, is no, not at a price anyone would pay. Understanding why requires understanding four interlocking constraints: incentive structures, operational arrangements, infrastructure standards, and regulatory requirements. These barriers not only stand between the United States and better passenger service but reinforce one another. Understanding them reveals why piecemeal reform has failed and what genuine improvement would require.¹

The Economic Rationale for Slow Trains

Freight railroads are private enterprises that maximize profit by hauling cargo at a cost lower than they charge to do so. The existence of passenger service gets in the way of this goal.

When Congress created Amtrak, it granted the new corporation statutory rights to access any freight railroad’s tracks at incremental cost, plus legal preference in dispatching. Both features impede good freight service. Amtrak pays little to the freight railroads on whose track it runs: typically, a few dollars per train-mile, covering only the marginal wear attributable to its trains. From the freight railroad’s perspective, Amtrak is a mandatory tenant paying below-market rent while demanding priority service.

Recent developments have made the tension worse. Since approximately 2015, Precision Scheduled Railroading (PSR) has swept through almost all the biggest freight railroads. PSR applies lean manufacturing principles to rail operations: run fewer, longer trains on strict schedules; minimize the time freight cars spend sitting in yards; reduce locomotive and equipment fleets; cut staff and facilities; and maximize asset utilization. Among adoptees, operating ratios—the share of revenue consumed by operating expenses, the metric Wall Street watches most closely—have fallen from the mid-sixties to the mid-fifties since PSR’s adoption. In practical terms, that means the railroads went from keeping roughly 35 cents of every revenue dollar to keeping 45 cents.

PSR’s efficiency gains create new problems for passenger trains. These longer trains, sometimes exceeding three miles in length, are harder to pass; a passenger train encountering one must trail until one of the rare sidings long enough to hold the freight becomes available. Tighter scheduling leaves less slack to absorb disruptions. And PSR’s metrics, such as operating ratio, car velocity, or asset utilization, do not include passenger performance.

This incentive asymmetry cascades through every aspect of railroad operations.

Because freight railroads gain nothing from passenger speed, dispatchers (the people who control train movements) face asymmetric incentives. Dispatchers employed by freight railroads are under constant pressure to keep freight moving; delays carry costs in service quality and shipper relationships. Delays to Amtrak carry no equivalent penalty.

Amtrak’s statutory dispatching preference exists on paper, but enforcement has been vanishingly rare. Until 2024, the Department of Justice had brought exactly one lawsuit to enforce Amtrak’s statutory rights: a 1979 case against Southern Pacific over the Sunset Limited between New Orleans and Houston, which ended in a consent decree without a final court ruling. In July 2024, the DOJ filed a second suit, this time against Norfolk Southern (NS) for its handling of the Crescent, which settled in 2025 with explicit commitments to prioritize Amtrak trains and require supervisor approval for any dispatching decision that does not. Two lawsuits in forty-five years is not a robust enforcement regime. And Amtrak has paid a price for it: freight train interference remains the leading cause of Amtrak delays on host railroads, causing over 850,000 minutes of delay in 2024, more than any other single category of delay.

The legal preference for passenger trains cannot overcome the daily reality that the people making operational decisions work for companies whose business is freight.

Recent enforcement actions suggest the regulatory environment may be shifting. In 2023, the Surface Transportation Board opened an investigation into Union Pacific’s handling of the Sunset Limited; in 2025, the case settled with explicit on-time performance commitments. The Passenger Rail Investment and Improvement Act of 2008 established that if Amtrak’s on-time performance falls below 80 percent for two consecutive quarters, STB can investigate whether the host railroad failed its statutory duty.

Whether this enforcement regime will durably improve performance remains uncertain, since the underlying incentive structure has not changed. Enforcement may improve specific routes under regulatory scrutiny, but it cannot align the interests of passengers and freight, which remain fundamentally at odds.

Built for Weight, Not Speed

The nature of America’s rails today also militates against good passenger service because building track for freight means choosing to support great weight, while building track for passengers means choosing to support great speed. And these are competing physical demands.

That may seem counterintuitive. Surely, track capable of handling 286,000-pound freight cars would easily support passenger trains weighing less than half as much? And surely, all things being equal, shippers want their goods to arrive at their destinations as quickly as possible? Why should freight and passenger service be at odds? It would seem that whatever helps one also helps the other.

Unfortunately, the opposite is true. Track built for weight is not the same as track built for speed. Freight needs strength; passengers need precision. The distinction lies in what engineers call track geometry: the precise alignment, surface, gauge, and banking of the rails.

Prioritizing freight means building track to carry enormous weight: a strong subgrade, heavy rails, and robust ties. But prioritizing passengers means building track for geometric precision, which is a separate engineering problem. A track can be immensely strong while being geometrically imprecise: featuring small variations in alignment, minor surface irregularities, and slight deviations in the distance between rails. For a 286,000-pound car rolling at 50 mph, these imperfections cause minor jolts. For a passenger train at 110 mph, the same imperfections produce dangerous shocks. Track irregularities imperceptible at low speeds create violent harmonic oscillations at high speeds because the vertical acceleration of a bump scales with the square of velocity. What feels like a gentle sway at 40 mph becomes a derailment risk at 110.

Heavy freight traffic actively degrades geometric precision. Each passage of a 286,000-pound car pounds the track incrementally out of alignment. The ballast shifts, the rails spread, and the surface develops irregularities. Freight railroads address this through maintenance, but at a slow cadence and with minimal intervention, restoring only the tolerances their trains require. Maintaining track to the requirements of safe operation at high passenger speeds requires more frequent inspection and correction. That’s a permanent and costly operating expense, not an occasional capital investment.

Curves pose a separate problem. Track must be banked for speed (what engineers call superelevation). The optimal bank depends on velocity: a curve set for sixty mph freight is underbanked for 110 mph passengers. The same curve serves both, so the compromise limits the faster trains. Adjusting the bank to favor passengers means rebuilding the curve: expensive, time-consuming, and required in thousands of places.

The Federal Railroad Administration classifies track in nine classes, each permitting specific maximum speeds. Class 4 track, which is the standard to which freight railroads maintain most of their mainlines, allows 60 mph for freight and 79 mph for passengers. Good passenger service requires better: Class 6 permits passenger speeds up to 110 mph; Class 8 permits 160 mph.

The cost differential is substantial. Maintaining track to Class 6 standards requires approximately 40 percent more work than Class 4: more frequent inspections, tighter geometric tolerances, and more intensive surfacing and alignment. Freight railroads derive no benefit from these higher standards, since heavy freight rarely operates above 60-to-70 mph. This additional maintenance imposes cost without offsetting revenue, so they simply choose not to do it. Unless a public entity commits to perpetual funding, or takes over maintenance entirely, tracks will drift back toward the standards that serve freight.

The Michigan Line illustrates this dynamic. Norfolk Southern owned the Detroit–Kalamazoo segment, which once supported trains running at 79 mph. But NS had determined that it could meet its freight customers’ needs by maintaining the line to 25 mph and had allowed it to deteriorate under slow orders toward the floor that satisfied its actual business requirements. This ceiling was, as state officials noted, “obviously not feasible” for passenger service, though entirely reasonable for a freight railroad whose traffic on that segment consisted of a few slow local trains.

The state of Michigan purchased the 135-mile segment in 2012, using $150 million in federal aid, and transferred maintenance responsibility to Amtrak. Higher speeds became possible only because the state had assumed responsibility not only for the track but also for maintenance standards and dispatching authority. Before state purchase, Norfolk Southern controlled train movements; after, Amtrak did, and on-time performance improved substantially. That wasn’t because anyone became more virtuous, but because the entity controlling train movements finally cared about passenger outcomes. The infrastructure was the same, but ownership changed everything.

Put simply: passengers care about speed. Speed is not a thing to build, but a thing to maintain. And the entity responsible for the track will maintain it to its own standards.

Rules Written for a Different World

Finally, layered atop the economic, operational, and infrastructural difficulties, are safety regulations that impose substantial costs on passenger service.

Thanks to decades of optimization for freight, American passenger trains operate in an environment unlike European or Japanese railways. They share track with trains weighing twenty thousand tons or more. They cross thousands of grade crossings where collisions with road vehicles are possible. They traverse thousands of route-miles, much of it single-track. This environment makes collisions more likely than on dedicated passenger networks. American rail regulation evolved to reflect this reality, prioritizing collision survival over collision avoidance: crashes will happen, so the rules aim to mitigate the damage when they do.

Two kinds of damage are possible. The rules mitigate damage to non-rail users by limiting or removing exposure. To operate above 110 mph, the track must feature enhanced grade crossing protection. Above 125 mph, grade crossings are effectively prohibited. And above 150 mph, mixed freight-passenger operation is forbidden outright. For most corridors, 110 mph represents a practical ceiling without dedicated right-of-way.

The rules mitigate damage to rail users by designing equipment standards to protect occupants in collisions. On the biggest railroads of the United States, passenger equipment must achieve 800,000 pounds of “buff strength,” meaning the car body must withstand that compressive force without permanent deformation of the occupied structure. Meeting this requirement demands heavier underframes, thicker reinforced end structures, and more structural steel. European regulations take a different approach: they emphasize crash energy management, allowing designated non-passenger areas (such as vestibules or equipment compartments) to crumple controllably and absorb impact energy. This permits lighter vehicles without sacrificing occupant protection, or at least does so if the operating environment encourages less collision risk by providing dedicated passenger tracks, minimal grade crossings, and no sharing with massive freight trains. American rules, shaped by the realities of mixed freight-passenger operations, don’t assume these things and require train cars that are significantly heavier than their European counterparts.

These regulations emerged from the freight-dominant environment. Changing them requires demonstrating that collision avoidance rather than collision survival can achieve equivalent levels of safety. That demonstration is possible, as Caltrain and others have shown, but it requires sustained effort and a regulatory posture oriented toward enabling passenger service rather than merely tolerating it.

Tying It All Together

The barriers to fast passenger service do not merely coexist; they form a system in which each element reinforces the others. Addressing any one in isolation produces frustration rather than progress.

Imagine that a state transportation department secures federal funding for capital upgrades to a corridor, raising it from Class 4 (79 mph) to Class 6 (110 mph). The corridor receives new rail, improved geometry, and enhanced grade crossings. But the freight railroad that owns the track has no incentive to maintain expensive Class 6 standards once the project is complete. Within a few years, heavy freight traffic degrades the geometry, and the track drifts down to Class 4. The state has purchased a one-time improvement that erodes without ongoing commitment.

Even if the state funds perpetual maintenance, the freight railroad still controls train movements. Its dispatchers, responding to their employer’s priorities, slot passenger trains around freight. The faster equipment sits behind three-mile freight trains waiting for sidings. The 110-mph capability translates to 65 mph average speeds because the operational authority hasn’t changed.

Then there’s the regulatory dimension. The state wants to operate modern European-designed trainsets capable of 125 mph. But above 110 mph, grade crossings must be eliminated, costing millions of dollars per crossing, with community opposition to each one. Until recently, that equipment itself required FRA waivers; even now, certification adds delay and cost. The state has upgraded infrastructure that its equipment cannot fully exploit.

Where meaningful improvement has occurred, it has required addressing multiple barriers simultaneously.

The Northeast Corridor (NEC) is the limiting case: public ownership, massive federal investment, and effective removal of freight. The result is 125 mph to 150 mph operation on significant stretches, making the NEC the only true higher-speed rail in the United States. But the NEC model requires traffic density that no other corridor can match.

The Michigan Line is a better template for improvement. State purchase addressed the incentive problem: Michigan now controls an asset it can maintain to passenger standards. Transfer of dispatching to Amtrak addressed the operational problem. Subsequent infrastructure investment brought the line up to 110 mph capability. Passenger service on the corridor now operates faster and more reliably, but only because the state attacked all four barriers together.

Caltrain’s work on the Peninsula Corridor demonstrates that the owner can navigate regulatory barriers if they have passenger interests at heart. Public ownership enabled FRA waivers for modern equipment; temporal separation addressed mixed traffic constraints; electrification, funded by local tax measures, enabled performance gains that justified regulatory relief. Compromises between uses still exist: freight still operates overnight, and speeds stay below what dedicated track would permit. Even so, the line shows what is possible when the owner takes passenger service seriously.

Brightline offers an instructive contrast. Florida’s only private intercity passenger railroad operates frequent, reliable service between Miami, Fort Lauderdale, and West Palm Beach. It did this not by solving the problem of sharing the right of way with freight traffic, but by bypassing it entirely. Brightline built or acquired dedicated infrastructure, owning its own track and controlling its own dispatching. It faces none of the barriers that constrain Amtrak on host railroads. This model requires either new construction or purchasing corridors from freight railroads, both demanding capital on a scale that private investors have rarely sustained. Brightline West, the company’s Las Vegas–Los Angeles project, has struggled for years to close financing despite strong traffic projections. The lesson is not that private operators cannot succeed, but that success requires escaping the shared infrastructure trap, and escaping it is expensive.

The pattern is consistent. Meaningful improvement requires either genuinely passenger-dominant corridors or dedicated infrastructure with aligned incentives. It can work, but it cannot be done cheaply, and it cannot be done piecemeal.

The Intractable Reality of American Rail

American passenger trains are slow because the system is doing exactly what its post-1970 incentives have encouraged it to do.

The four barriers—incentive structures, operational arrangements, infrastructure standards, and regulatory thresholds—are not bugs, but features of a network optimized for freight. Freight railroads maintain track to standards that serve their needs. Dispatchers prioritize the traffic that pays their employers’ bills. Regulators wrote rules that reflected the realities of mixed operations. And the incentive structure that drives it all rewards efficiency in moving goods while treating passenger performance as someone else’s problem.

Comparisons to Europe are seductive but misleading. European railways, mostly state-owned and politically accountable for passenger service, prioritized passengers and accepted low freight modal share as the cost. American railroads, privately owned and profit-seeking, prioritized freight and left passenger service to a subsidized public corporation operating on tracks it doesn’t own. Historians may debate whether America made the right choice in 1970, but the choice was made. Its consequences have played out for five decades, shaping investment, institutional development, and physical infrastructure. The question facing us today is whether the trade-off remains acceptable and what changing it would cost.

The trade-offs are real. American freight railroads move cargo at roughly one-quarter the cost per ton-mile of trucking. The likely consequence of passenger-first optimization on shared corridors would be the diversion of freight from rail to road, meaning more trucks on highways: more congestion, more road damage, and more emissions. A single freight train can replace three hundred trucks, meaning that the logic of sustainability favors rail for cargo even as the service arithmetic favors rail for passengers. Optimizing for one means accepting costs on the other.

Building separate passenger infrastructure avoids this trade-off but introduces another: expense. California’s high-speed rail project, the most ambitious attempt at dedicated passenger track in a generation, has seen costs balloon from $33 billion to over $100 billion, with completion decades away, if it is completed at all. The NEC’s Acela operates on dedicated track only in limited segments; expanding that model nationwide would require investment on a scale American politics has never sustained.

The realistic paths forward are more modest. On specific corridors with sufficient traffic, like Michigan, Virginia, North Carolina, or California, public acquisition and sustained investment can produce genuine improvement. The toolkit exists: purchase strategic segments, fund ongoing maintenance, transfer dispatching authority, design investments that serve freight interests alongside passenger interests (as Virginia’s Potomac crossing does for CSX). These interventions work and can be replicated.

But they will not produce a European-style national network. That gap is structural, driven by geography, commodity flows, population distribution, and the competitive position of alternative modes. These are facts about the physical and economic landscape, not mere policy failures we can correct.

The question “why can’t America have trains like Europe?” assumes the comparison is apt—but it isn’t. America has the world’s most productive freight rail network, and the cost is slow passenger trains. The equilibrium we have is neither an accident nor a failure but a choice, one made incrementally over fifty years, which has delivered real value. Whether to unmake it is a decision that we should make with clear understanding of what would be gained, and what would be lost.

This article is an American Affairs online exclusive, published February 20, 2026.

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