I’m going off of memory here, but what I heard was that passenger rail was never really as profitable as freight, so the government basically had to force all the rail companies to keep doing passenger trains. The massive subsidization of car transit made it hard for them to compete. Amtrak was basically created as a way to take the responsibility for doing passenger rail away from the rail companies, in exchange for guaranteed priority usage of the rails.
The priority of passenger trains is unenforced, so they have to wait for slow freight trains all the time. Additionally, the math on speed is different for freight vs passenger rail. A freight train getting somewhere an hour faster doesnt matter nearly as much as a passenger train getting somewhere an hour faster, so improvements to facilitate faster trains falls on amtrak.
Amtrak does own some rails, e.g., the northeast corridor, which is nice and profitable. It’s also worth noting that the “unprofitable” lines are still vastly vastly vastly more profitable than roads.
I was told that part of the reason is that railways are rented and mostly used for freight.
I’m going off of memory here, but what I heard was that passenger rail was never really as profitable as freight, so the government basically had to force all the rail companies to keep doing passenger trains. The massive subsidization of car transit made it hard for them to compete. Amtrak was basically created as a way to take the responsibility for doing passenger rail away from the rail companies, in exchange for guaranteed priority usage of the rails.
The priority of passenger trains is unenforced, so they have to wait for slow freight trains all the time. Additionally, the math on speed is different for freight vs passenger rail. A freight train getting somewhere an hour faster doesnt matter nearly as much as a passenger train getting somewhere an hour faster, so improvements to facilitate faster trains falls on amtrak.
Amtrak does own some rails, e.g., the northeast corridor, which is nice and profitable. It’s also worth noting that the “unprofitable” lines are still vastly vastly vastly more profitable than roads.
By “subsidizing” they loaded passenger trains with mail from usps. In the 20th century, trains had to compete with government subsidized highways.
The US is third on the list of countries in freight volume per year, so yes there’s a lot of freight trains.