Where Are America's Trains?

If you're watching this in America, you probably haven't been on a train recently.

Europe is crammed ass to ankles with trains whisking people in scarves

and capri pants all over the continent.

Same with China and Japan and a ton of other countries.

But if you're doing some traveling in America,

aside from a single corridor in the Northeast,

your only real options are car or plane.

I mean, we are the richest country in the history of the world.

So, where the are all of America's trains?

Now, ordinarily, it would take me like 40 minutes to answer that,

but I can do it right now.

America has a ton of trains.

In fact, at this very moment,

America has the largest train network in the entire world with about 140,000 miles

of track in operation.

The bad news is

that you can't use it

because the vast majority of America's train tracks are owned

and operated by freight companies. priority goes to gigantic trains carrying literal miles of

heavy ass cargo.

And because the tracks are so old and up and they don't fix them,

they often travel at a brisk walking pace so they don't derail.

Sometimes they still do.

Be free.

Passenger trains are stuck having to kind of work around freight trains.

And as you can probably imagine,

it results in one of the least effective passenger rail systems in the developed

world.

America has been screwing over passenger rail for decades.

But maybe there's something we can do about it.

Maybe.

Hi, I'm Raleigh Williams,

a guy with a climate science

and policy degree and a lifelong admiration for trains.

>> What is it, Raleigh?

>> A train.

>> A train.

And this is a video about America's struggling pasture lines.

Welcome to Climate Town.

Okay, so if you are one of the noble few who's taken a ride

on our nationallyowned rail service known

as Amtrak,

you've probably noticed that the trains are in pretty rough shape.

They're decades old, they're constantly late,

and sometimes they have to completely stop to let a threemile long coal train

go past.

Cranes are already bogged down after widespread delays yesterday.

>> Been waiting about an hour and 45 minutes.

>> Like I guess like the whole Amtrak is shut down.

How frustrated are you?

I'm enraged.

>> But would you believe it

if I said this is actually a huge improvement from where passenger rail was

in the 1950s?

UH-OH.

1950S.

WE'RE GOING BACK IN TIME.

The gigantic nationwide train network

that built American industry into the envy of the world had fallen on hard

times.

Cars, planes, and buses had exploded onto the scene,

and railroad companies found themselves losing market share and hemorrhaging money,

and the primary culprit was passenger rail.

Americans definitely used to take the train to get around,

but as car ownership became the norm

and the government poured more

and more cash into roads,

train ridership fell off a cliff.

In 1916, 98% of trips were taken by train.

And by 1956, that number was down to 4%.

It got so bad for rail companies

that for every dollar they made from ticket sales,

it cost them a $181 in expenses.

The only reason they even ran these passenger lines anymore was

because government regulations forced them to,

which honestly was mostly their fault.

Trains had been run by such ruthless

and evil business owners

that President Grover Cleveland had to establish America's very first federal regulatory agency in

1887.

And its purpose was to stop rail barons from exploiting the molasses out of

American citizens.

Six decades later, those governmentmandated passenger routes were dragging rail companies into bankruptcy.

To discontinue service, rail companies could either petition the government

or they could make

that service so unpleasant

and inconvenient that the customers abandoned the lines themselves.

And oh my, did they do the second one.

Rail companies would get rid of dining cars, let trains fall into disrepair,

demolish bathrooms, close station waiting rooms,

and cut service back so far it was essentially useless.

Oh, you want to go to Pikipsy?

Well, all we got is the 3:00 a.m. train.

Does that work for you?

It doesn't.

OH, NO.

AND IF THE GOVERNMENT did grant them a waiver to drop a passenger line,

they would stop running train service immediately,

shutting down the train in the middle of the route

and kicking everyone off. like the 14 people who got left in Birmingham,

Alabama on their way to New Orleans.

And I'm sure Tennessee Williams could write a real barn burner of a play

about the stranded passengers in the Birmingham train station,

but in practice, it was getting impossible to take a train in this era.

By the late 1960s, the entire rail industry, both freight and passenger,

had hit rock bottom with the biggest corporate bankruptcy in the history of the

US.

But if you know anything about corporate bankruptcies in America, oh yeah,

the government stepped in to bail out freight companies by letting them get rid

of their passenger routes.

And President Richard Nixon himself signed the Rail Passenger Service Act of 1970.

This took all the passenger routes

that had either been neglected

or actively sabotaged by the freight companies

and smashed them together into a sort of team of misfit teens they called

Rail Packs.

But even in the 1970s, they realized that name sucks.

So they renamed it Amtrak.

Next time, see what a thrill it is to fly on a train.

All aboard.

All >> now.

Republican presidents are usually on the cut funding for public transportation side of the

equation.

And Nixon was no exception.

He didn't like the idea of nationalizing passenger rail

and only agreed to create Amtrak

because it was supposedly going to become a profitable company once they worked the

kinks out.

This was of course a lie.

Amtrak was never on track to become profitable.

They just had to say it was in order to get the bill passed.

And this is not a guess.

According to Department of Transportation official Jim Mlelen,

we did not put all of our cards on the table.

We bent the truth.

That's politics.

And before you get all libertarian on me,

pretty much every rail network in the world,

from nationwide rail services to state-run commuter rail,

is at least partially governmentfunded and run.

These are massive pieces of infrastructure with thousands of employees and moving parts.

If you want consistent service

that can get people where they need to go

and stimulate the economy

and take cars off the road

and about a million other benefits,

it almost always requires some amount of government funding to operate and maintain.

And yet, Amtrak was about to get almost no government funding

and then immediately become profitable right after passenger rail had been

so unprofitable that it almost bankrupted all of railroading in America.

How is this the plan?

This is the system that we're going to PUT INTO OUR LAWS.

WHAT ARE WE DOING?

What are It was a disaster waiting to happen.

And you wouldn't even have to wait that long.

Hopefully, Amtrak will be the solution

that will save the passenger train service in the United States.

Amtrak officially launched on May 7th, 1971.

But rather than buy a fleet of new passenger cars,

or rolling stock as train people call them,

they would have to use the old passenger cars

that the private railroad companies weren't using anymore.

But weren't those mostly dilapidated old garbage cars

that weren't being maintained

as a way to save money?

Yes.

Actually, here's a great quote about Amtrak's cars.

These rolling junk boxes were catching fire at the rate of one per day

all aboard.

And the mandate to somehow suddenly become profitable affected the number of routes Amtrak

could run.

Newly minted Amtrak president Roger Lewis took a long hard look at the company,

which was probably a great idea because he had exactly zero railroad experience.

He was a former defense contractor,

which might explain why he immediately destroyed 40% of the former inner city passenger

routes.

But Amtrak wasn't going down without a fight.

Even at drastically reduced service,

they could offer the American public something that cars and planes never could.

I'm talking about a little thing called showmanship.

>> Our magic world on wheels where your eyes are filled with wonder

and there's friendship all around.

The super liner experience.

>> Something about a train that's magic.

Oh, yeah, baby.

You just try banging your middle-aged spouse on an airplane

or hitting on a buffet of much younger men in your car.

And at the risk of painting Amtrak as the horny transit alternative,

they briefly required their female employees to wear short shorts.

>> But ultimately, if Amtrak could just get people to their destinations with some

kind of consistency,

they should be just fine.

Oh no.

See, Amtrak is short for American train track.

And the evil genie level of irony

that Amtrak right from the very start is

that Amtrak doesn't actually own the track.

You know, the thing that trains need to go anywhere.

When freight rail dropped passenger trains,

it got to keep the hundreds of thousands of miles of track in the

divorce.

Amtrak owned a few hundred miles of track in the Northeast,

but for the rest of their thousands of miles of service,

they'd have to ask freight rail to borrow their track

and then pay them for the privilege.

As you may have guessed, this created a problem immediately.

A year into Amtrak's existence,

their long-distance trains were on time about 70% of the time. 2 years in,

that number was just 35%.

The government passed an amendment in 1973 to solve the problem by explicitly giving

passenger trains right of way over freight trains.

But then freight trains didn't listen.

And since only the Department of Justice has the authority to punish freight rail,

and they didn't really feel like pressing charges,

freight trains just kept doing whatever they wanted to do on the tracks

that they owned.

This created a beautiful railroad loop of where the underfunded Amtrak trains would get

stuck behind freight. their customers would be late,

they would stop riding the train and Amtrak would be even more underfunded.

And it just kept going around and around like that.

And then in 1978,

the government realized it was insane to judge Amtrak as a for-profit company,

so they dropped the mandate in 1978.

But that hasn't stopped a bunch of politicians from constantly bringing up the old

profit plan.

>> Richard Nixon said, "This thing has to be profitable within a couple of

years or we're going to get rid of it."

Amtrak's been run for 38 years.

It has never made a profit.

>> Has Amtrak ever turned a profit?

>> Since its creation in 1971, Amtrak has never made a profit.

>> Since 1971, Amtrak has never made a profit.

The single bright light in all of American passenger rail,

and the only place where Amtrak was doing kind of okay,

was the same place where they didn't have to borrow their tracks from the

freight companies.

I'm talking, of course, about the Northeast Corridor.

If the continental US looks like a messed up horse with ridiculously short legs

and the most commanding ass you've ever seen in your life,

the Northeast Corridor is the throat.

And this little 2% of land packs in 15% of the country's population,

including Boston on the chin side, DC on the chest,

and New York City right around the Adams apple, if horses have those.

Actually, let me just check and see.

Okay, they do.

So, New York City is the horses Adams Apple.

Where was I?

So, right off the bat, this stretch screams good train idea.

On top of that,

the run of track from DC to Boston is primarily owned by Amtrak

and sees very little freight travel compared to the rest of the country.

And on top of that, people actually ride these trains.

In 1980, more than half of Amtrak's ridership came from this one stretch,

which is less than 5% of the total system.

But even though this was by far the best train corridor in the entire

US,

it still had a ton of problems.

Even without freight, we literally cannot shoot our video about how often trains are

delayed because there's too many announcements talking about a delayed train.

>> But even though this was by far the best train corridor in the US,

it still had a ton of problems.

And even without freight, a lot of those problems came down to the tracks.

Here's the line from DC to Boston.

And here's the portion that Amtrak owns.

So they can hit top speeds on this portion,

which means you can go from DC to New York in under three hours.

But when you get past New York,

you have to run slower on the tracks

that are owned by New York Commuter Rail,

then Connecticut DOT, then Amtrak again, then Boston commuter rail to finish it off.

So you might hit top speeds for a little bit here,

but everywhere else it's kind of like having a Ferrari on a dirt road,

which makes the average speed way below all the far better train systems around

the world.

But even with all of these problems,

Northeast Corridor ridership and revenue has boomed over the past couple of decades.

So maybe we can actually do this.

I mean, maybe we might really like trains

if they're even a little bit okay.

Unfortunately, the rest of the system still has to deal with freight.

But I mean, you know, how much worse could this possibly get?

I'm sorry.

Hang on.

Hello.

Yes, I did just ask that.

A lot worse.

How?

A cliffhanger for an ad.

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Only you should be you.

And we're back to finally answer the question of how things could possibly have

gotten worse for Amtrak.

Remember all those freight rail companies that owned the tracks?

Well, what used to be dozens of independent rail companies had consolidated into just

seven mega companies.

And those seven companies were skiing the American slopes of maximizing shareholder value.

They ripped up the track that didn't make the money, cut back on workers,

and ran longer and longer trains with older and older equipment.

They also delayed track maintenance to save money, which was maybe okay for freight.

I mean, it could just rumble along at 5 m an hour

and the coal would just,

you know, get there when it got there.

People, however, kind of freak out when they're 16 hours late for something.

And Amtrak's fortunes took yet another turn for the worse.

>> All aboard.

All aboard.

All aboard and track.

>> With freight rails latest pivot to a thing called precision scheduled railroading.

It was pioneered by this dude with the wonderful result of bringing

that private equity mindset to rail companies

and sending a hundred billion dollars back to shareholders at the expense of everything

else.

There's a great John Oliver episode about this.

>> I got blood all over my hands from injuries in this industry

that should have been avoidable.

It's the kind of honesty you only usually get from a guy like

that after he's been visited by the ghosts of Christmas.

But basically, freight operators have made trains a lot longer to cut costs.

How much longer?

Oh, I don't know.

How about over 3 miles of train?

That's about as long as Central Park.

But don't worry because they're also cutting crew members.

Now I want you to ask yourself,

how many people do you think there should be working on a threemile long

train?

Let's say it's carrying molten sulfur, hot asphalt, and nuclear waste.

How many crew members do you think they should require to work on

that train?

Cuz if you're the freight industry, the answer is one.

One guy.

Oops, there's a problem near the back of the train.

I guess I'll go ahead and stop the train,

walk two miles to see what went wrong with the carrying some of the

most hazardous materials known to man,

hopefully fix it, then walk 2 miles back.

Now that's efficiency.

Let me tell you my confusion.

You have returned a gigantic amount of money to shareholders.

You just mentioned the 740 basis point decline in expenses.

What I'm confused about is why did you need to even switch to precision

precision railing?

Maybe you can explain it to me because as far as I was concerned,

you were pretty precise.

When Jim Kramer thinks you're thinking about profits too much, you've got problems.

>> How you eat spam, by the way,

just right out of the >> We usually have it with a fork called

a tub.

>> David, you can eat anywhere you want.

Let me give you some spam juice.

>> Luckily, the government stepped in on

that one man on the train thing

and passed a law to fix all of

that with two crew members.

Two crew members on a threemile train

and freight companies are still pissed about it.

But through it all, freight companies have been consistent about exactly one thing.

They are still flagrantly violating the law

that says they have to let Amtrak go ahead of freight trains.

Hell yeah, players, stay toxic.

And since the 1980s,

the Department of Justice has filed a lawsuit against freight companies delaying Amtrak exactly

one time.

And that one time was in 2024

when the DOJ alleged the Norfolk Southern Railroad was

so prolifically in the way

that just 57% of Amtrak trains on this line were on time.

And after Norfolk Southern tried to get the case dismissed and failed,

the Department of Justice issued this statement as part of the settlement.

Americans traveling by train are entitled to trips free from delays caused by railroads

failing to give Amtrak preference over freight trains.

The punishment?

Well, they have to give Amtrak trains the highest priority,

which is already the law,

but also they have to help the government figure out who's causing all these

delays.

But still technically a win, which means Amtrak won freight rail.

Don't Don't look at that.

Stop.

Stop looking at that.

Yet, despite being constantly underfunded

and whatever the real life version of cyber bullied is,

Amtrak has held on.

Ridership has been rising over the years.

And in 2025, Amtrak provided a record 34.5 million customer trips.

And when Amtrak actually owns most of the track they operate on,

like from New York to DC, the results are even better.

While short hall flights still dominate a lot of the US markets,

there are four times more train riders than airline passengers between New York

and DC.

And also, Amtrak makes Soprano suits now.

But unfortunately, those suits are almost $300 and you can't even buy them anymore.

So, here we are stuck with the same mly crew of shitty passenger lines

that was smashed together into Amtrak almost 60 years ago.

So, what are we going to do about it?

Well, first of all,

the Department of Justice can continue to enforce the law

that freight operators keep breaking.

So far, it's just been

that one lawsuit in 40 years with no major penalties.

But I guess it's a start

and it might be the best we're going to do

if we're going to keep forcing Amtrak trains to borrow the tracks from freight

companies.

But the big solution, and I think it's probably obvious to anyone watching this,

is to fund Amtrak properly.

I mean, a lot of people in this country still think

that Amtrak needs to be printing money.

But for most of the rest of the world,

public transportation is a public good, which they fund to benefit society.

They don't cram passenger rail in behind freight trains.

They build dedicated track and allow passenger trains to flourish.

I mean, look at these trains flourishing.

LOOK AT THEM GO.

MY GOD, WE COULD HAVE THAT.

I'M SORRY.

If you're trying to tell me

that the government shouldn't be funding Amtrak

because it's not profitable.

Boy, have I got some terrible news for you about fire departments, the police,

the military, my god, highways.

Jesus Christ.

The entire lifetime of Amtrak funding is less than one single year in highway

spending.

Roads have cost the American taxpayers over a trillion dollars in net government spending.

And that study ended in 2012.

Oh This is it.

>> Now, under the Biden administration, Amtrak did get some extra funding, which is awesome.

But they have been

so underfunded for so long

that they have to use $5 billion of it just to replace a tunnel

on the Northeast Corridor that's 150 years old.

The line that accounts for half of Amtrak's ridership runs through a tunnel

that was built during the Ulisses Srant administration.

That guy.

When's the last time you thought about that guy?

I mean, obviously we have to do it,

but we also have to consider it pretty much the bare minimum.

And then there's the climate side of trains.

And in the US, unfortunately, that's also pretty bad.

Aside from the electrified Northeast Corridor, almost all Amtrak routes still run diesel trains.

So, even though electrified trains can be way lower emission than planes or cars,

America's diesel trains still blast out CO2.

Heroko Tabuchi from the New York Times had to fight to take a train

across the country for work,

only to find out

that the diesel train emissions were probably worse than flying for

that long of a trip.

So, definitely take a train

if you're in the Northeast

or if it's only a few hundred miles.

But until we can actually electrify,

there really isn't a low emission train option

if you're trying to go from like Chicago to New York.

But maybe one day we can actually build good passenger trains.

We could even put some serious federal dollars behind high-speed rail,

a thing that Japan already did in the year 1964.

That's right, 60 years ago, Japan had highspeed rail.

America has never had highspeed rail.

It's awesome here and I can feel you right now.

You're diving for that comment section.

You want to pop off about how much you love highspeed rail.

And to that I say go with God, my friend.

And while you're down there,

why don't you give me an auga and just know this,

we're currently writing a whole episode about highspeed rail

and it's going to be awesome.

So check that out when it drops.

But for now, whenever you find yourself wishing we had good trains in America,

just remember that we absolutely do.

They're just for freight.

And apparently we wouldn't have it any other way.

All Amtrak.

All aboard.

Yeah, I messed the one.

Thanks, Rick.

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Okay.

Okay.

I have not tried marijuana.

Uh I have never used it at any time.

Did you hear that pop?