Ugly August Timekeeping, but Crescent Shines Bright

by Jim Mathews / President & CEO

With heat, flooding, and construction, August is often a poor month for timekeeping across our Nation’s passenger-rail services, and this August hit passengers pretty hard – collectively, the state-supported routes and the long-distance routes were both five percent worse on Customer On-Time Performance (Customer OTP) than the 12-month moving average, Amtrak reports show.

But among the Long Distance routes, the Crescent – fresh off a Justice Dept. settlement on poor timekeeping – broke out of the pack and was the only long-haul train to beat the Federal Railroad Administration’s 80-percent Customer OTP standard in August.

The Northeast Corridor eked out meeting the 80-percent Customer OTP threshold in August, but only by 1.4 percent. Acela and Northeast Regional services both just failed to reach 80 percent, while Pennsylvania’s Keystone pulled the NEC average up, contributing its 92.9 percent Customer OTP record for the month to the overall results on the Corridor.

Of 30 state-supported or non-NEC services, only six met the threshold set in FRA regulations – Capitol Corridor services were better than 90 percent on-time, the Downeaster was 82.8 percent for August, the Hiawatha was 82.3 percent, while the Missouri service notched 83.5 percent and the Pacific Surfliner got just over 84 percent.

Our brand-new Mardi Gras between New Orleans and Mobile is running at 83.5 percent, and host railroad CSX is genuinely trying to do its level best to get that train over the road on time.

The worst non-NEC corridor route for Customer OTP was the beleaguered Maple Leaf, finishing August with an astonishingly meager 27.4 percent on-time performance.

But even so, the worst performance system-wide belongs to the Southwest Chief, which managed to meet the Customer OTP standard only 13.4 percent of the time in August, three times worse than its already-depressing 12-month moving average.

Although the Keystone enjoys the best on-time performance, the big winner for August has to be the Crescent between New York City and New Orleans. The Crescent was the only one of the 15 operating long-distance services to beat the FRA’s Customer OTP standard, coming in at 83.9 percent for August.

And yes, I hear you thinking it; I thought it, too. The Crescent is the train that provoked the Dept. of Justice during the final year of the Biden Administration to drag Norfolk Southern in front of a Federal district court judge for allegedly violating the so-called “preference clause” in Federal law that requires Amtrak trains to go first whenever practical and possible.

The 52-year-old statute – 49 U.S.C. § 24308(c) – reads that host railroads must give Amtrak “preference over freight transportation in using a rail line, junction, or crossing” unless: (1) there is an emergency; or (2) a host railroad asks the Surface Transportation Board for relief, and the STB orders otherwise.

This graph below shows the on-time performance of each of Amtrak’s host railroads over the past two years. The black line linked with squares is Norfolk Southern’s trend-line, and it's easy to see the dramatic improvement becoming very evident in August of 2024. That’s only one month after the Justice Dept. filed its complaint before District Judge Amy Berman Jackson in Washington, D.C.

Last week, Norfolk Southern accepted a Justice Dept. settlement to clear the case, and that settlement should help to keep Crescent timekeeping, and other Amtrak trains dispatched on N-S, within a reasonable range.

As we’d said last week, Amtrak trains will get not just priority, but “highest priority” in dispatching on Norfolk Southern territory. N-S dispatchers will get extra training to ensure Amtrak priority, and if there’s a non-emergency situation that requires Amtrak trains to lose priority, a dispatcher’s supervisor must approve it.

Norfolk Southern has to provide the Justice Dept. with records on any delays involving the Crescent, and the railroad’s Vice President of Compliance will annually certify to DOJ that Norfolk Southern is keeping up its end of the agreement and its obligations under the law to provide Amtrak trains preference.

When we reported this last week, a lot of naysayers (who clearly only read the headline and did not read the settlement terms or our blog post describing them) complained that this would change nothing. I suppose that’s still possible, and Class I railroads are often poor partners. But I’ll point out (again) that there are a lot of former shady defense contractors in jail right now for “certifying” things to DOJ or the Defense Dept. that weren’t true. Certification is a serious commitment. It’s not a good thing to fudge. Whoever signs that certification page to DOJ next year will be thinking hard about what it will mean if it's not true.