Amtrak Travels Second Class – Especially on the BNSF Hi Line

[This is one of several posts about my trip from Oregon to Massachusetts and back to visit my son for Thanksgiving.  Mostly written during or shortly after the trip, I’m just getting around to finishing and posting them.]

 

Westbound Amtrak Empire Builder coming into Fargo on a winter’s day

I love riding trains, but Amtrak is forever running late (so am I, but this is not about me, it’s about trains).  Coming back to Oregon in December on the Empire Builder, the train west from Chicago to Portland and Seattle,* we arrived 16 hours behind schedule.  Left Chicago four hours late due to engine trouble.   We approached Fargo, ND just after dawn of a clear, very cold day. Once there I started to wonder if Fargo was as FAR as we would Go.  Sat there for about four hours. We were about four and a half hours late leaving Chicago.and lost more time along the way.  C’est l vie en Amtrak. 

There are many, many BNSF locomotives scattered in all the small towns along the northern route called the Hi Line. While waiting in Fargo, outside my window there was a small shed connected to a very tall radio tower. The shed had this sign on it:

While we were waiting, I saw several BNSF engines moving along a parallel track. Maybe someone was playing with the remote? Probably not much excitement in Fargo – not that day anyway.  A few weeks later, on December 30 an oil train wrecked on another BNSF rail line just west of Fargo and several cars exploded. The town of Casselton was evacuated, and according to reports, Amtrak Empire Builder service between Fargo and Grand Forks was disrupted.

 

Back to why we were running so late.  Turned out that the eastbound Empire Builder was stuck with engine trouble somewhere beyond Fargo.  They sent a BNSF locomotive out to pull it into Fargo.  We had to wait in the train yard until they cleared the single track.  After the disabled eastbound train got pulled in we got moving, going backwards to switch tracks to go forward, westward, many hours after we should have left Fargo, headed toward the oil fields (but that’s for another post).

I saw two trucks go by with what looked like wind turbine blades.   And near Shelby, Montana a big wind farm, much bigger than this photo indicates, but I like the dramatic sky.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

We had to wait on sidings for freight train after freight train. Sometimes, the train crew said, they had to stop the train to operate switches. This happened before on a trip I took during below zero weather – the switches freeze and have to be operated manually.   A couple of times (that I know of) the train crew hit their 12 hour limit and we had to wait in the middle of nowhere for relief crews to be brought in. Normally these crew changes are built into the schedule and happen at regular stops, but with the schedule so out of whack, they had to bring the crews to the train.  Looking at the Amtrak app that tracks train status, I saw that several trains in both directions on the Empire Builder were hours late that week.

In fact after our train left Chicago, Amtrak cancelled several trains on this route in both directions for the next few days. They wanted to get their crews unscrambled and their schedule back together. Amtrak blamed increased freight traffic, specifically mentioning North Dakota oil. I can testify to the hundreds of tank cars passing by or sitting in train yards on this route. Some are marked ethanol, but most probably carry oil. Not only are they wreaking havoc with schedules, they are dangerous – in the last few months several trains carrying crude oil have had explosive wrecks. BNSF attributed delays to oil and grain freight (did see a whole lot of grain cars too) and cold weather “that slows everything down.”

I take Amtrak’s delays more or less in stride; I’ve been on many cross country train trips and been late more than not (once stayed overnight in Chicago on Amtrak’s nickel because I missed a connection.)  The train ride is part of the whole experience for me.  Most people are pretty laid back about it all, but a few people have time sensitive things to do and it’s a problem for them.  On the other hand, it’s one more negative impact to add to the many negative impacts of the North Dakota oil boom and fossil fuels in general. It’s a vicious circle – as far as fuel use and greenhouse gas emissions go rail travel is better than flying or most driving, but if it’s so unreliable, people will stop taking trains generating more demand for fossil fuels and more emissions.  And Warren Buffett (whose company owns BNSF) gets richer and richer. 

There’s another vicious circle – if fewer people take the train, there will be less and less support for public investment in passenger rail. Even on the Northeast Corridor (Boston-NYC-DC) where demand is high and significant improvements have been made to the track, the power system and equipment; even with Vice President Biden as a long-time passenger, Amtrak does not come close to standards set in Europe and Japan.

 * They split the Portland and Seattle segments in Spokane going west and join them going east.