Killing Amtrak: terrible OTP

[Sam Damon]

#30(27) into Pittsburgh: 6:50a, one hour, 20 minutes late. #30(27) into Washington, DC: 3:15p, one hour, 45 minutes down. No chain reaction issues this day, as #44 was running on the Memorial Day holiday, and departs Pittsburgh at 1:20p.

Amtrak.com prediction for #30(28) into Pittsburgh as of this posting: 6:27a, 57 minutes late. We'll see.

 

[Sam Damon]

#30(28) into Pittsburgh: 5:42a, 12 minutes late (OT by DOT criteria). As of this posting, #30(28) is projected into Washington, DC at 1:30p, on time. However, Amtrak.com also estimates #30(28) as being 40 minutes late into Martinsburg, WV. We shall see.

Bonus: #29(28) into Pittsburgh at 12:09a, 26 minutes late. That train, the WB Capitol Limited, terminated in Chicago at 8:28a, 12 minutes early. Hurray!

Must be the lack of traffic over the holiday weekend.

 

[PRR 60]

To the best of my knowledge, the US DOT does not have on-time standards for intercity rail (Amtrak). The standards are internal to Amtrak: 10 minute tolerance for trips up to 300 miles in length, 30 minute tolerance for trips over 300 miles.

The only exception is Acela. Even though Boston - Washington is over 300 miles, Amtrak applies the 10 minute tolerance for all Acela trips. This is a recent change brought about by the current Amtrak management who felt (rightly) that a 30 minute tolerance was not appropriate for Acela timekeeping standards.

Mr. Pittsburgher,

I always appreciate your contributions to to forum. Gotta give you credit, usually, you're sharp as a tack. In this case, I've got to refer you to the Bureau of Transportation and Statistics website. BTS is part of the US DOT, and was created to administer transportation data collection, analysis, and reporting in the USA.

Once there, you can search for a table like this one. Towards the bottom of the page, you'll see BTS classifies trains as being late according to the following criteria:

Trip Length(miles) / Delayed departure time (minutes)

0-250 / 10

251-350 / 15

351-450 / 20

451-550 / 25

>551 / 30

This is how an Amtrak train can be "on-time" as far as DOT is concerned, and still be 19 minutes late. In this example, the train must not travel more than 450 miles for DOT to consider it "on-time." Hope this helps.

Not to be a nit-picker (well, sadly, I am a nit-picker and cannot be cured), but the data on the BTS page is simply a re-publishing of data sent to BTS by Amtrak and re-iterates Amtrak's internal on-time criteria. Since Amtrak is the one and only intercity rail carrier, DOT has no need to standardize data with other carriers to provide an apples and apples performance comparison. BTS simply takes the Amtrak data and reproduces it. DOT does not set on-time criteria for rail like they have for air. They just accept Amtrak's criteria and publish the results.

What is interesting is that the criteria shown is the BTS table is either wrong or outdated. It is not the standard used by Amtrak today.