# Where Are America's Trains?

## Метаданные

- **Канал:** Climate Town
- **YouTube:** https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sN7e38Q7e1U
- **Дата:** 28.05.2026
- **Длительность:** 28:54
- **Просмотры:** 512,265

## Описание

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## Содержание

### [0:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sN7e38Q7e1U) Segment 1 (00:00 - 05:00)

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. 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

### [5:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sN7e38Q7e1U&t=300s) Segment 2 (05:00 - 10:00)

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

### [10:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sN7e38Q7e1U&t=600s) Segment 3 (10:00 - 15:00)

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 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

### [15:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sN7e38Q7e1U&t=900s) Segment 4 (15:00 - 20:00)

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. Okay. Online scammers will stop at nothing to identity theft me. That's why whenever I'm outside, I always use a body double. Oh yeah. By the time they identity theft other Raleigh, I'll be halfway to Huarez. It's the perfect system. But perhaps you're not ready to abandon everyone in your life at a moment's notice and head for the hills. If that's the case for you, you might like Incogn. Incognist because we live in a world where everyone's data has been extremely breached online. We personally get an email every other week about someone who has exposed our data online and they're really sorry about it. My social security number, my home address, my phone number, it's all grist for the mill for scams and identity theft. And that's where incogns. They're patrolling the internet every day for websites that have your data and getting it removed. They know all the tricks of the trade. And I think they actually get a sick little thrill every time they delete something. They even track it in their dashboard so you can see exactly what lists your info was on and where they are in the removal process. But the best part is incogn's custom removals feature. Other Raleigh here was surfing the internet the other day when he found someone trying to impersonate him, which is only one step away from trying to impersonate me. Now, ordinarily that would be my sign to get rid of other Raleigh. But instead, we just sent a link to our dedicated privacy expert, and they took care of us. Awesome. So, take back your identity online and let Incogn do it for you. They can't harm you if they can't find you. Use code climate at the website below and get 60% off the annual price. incogn. com/climate. 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 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 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.

### [20:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sN7e38Q7e1U&t=1200s) Segment 5 (20:00 - 25:00)

— 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 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

### [25:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sN7e38Q7e1U&t=1500s) Segment 6 (25:00 - 28:00)

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. Hey, thanks for watching this video. I know it might seem like we kind of throw these things together, but we actually put a ton of work into every single part of these, from the research to the writing to the shooting to the editing. We are reading multiple books. We're calling up experts. We're digging through old PDFs from the 1970s. We even wrote a scene in a music studio and we got a music studio. We could have rewritten it to be anywhere else. And the only reason why we're able to keep making these videos is the generous support from people on the Climate Town Patreon page. So, if that's you, thank you so much. We could not do it without you. And for just a couple dollars a month, you too can be part of the beating heart that keeps Climate Town alive and well. Now, people join our Patreon page for a bunch of different reasons. Here are some of them. And some people join for access to the Climate Town landline. That is a physical phone that sits on my desk. We will give you the number. You can call it. Hello. Who is it? It's me. I will answer that phone and we will get as weird as you want. Okay? I'M NOT AFRAID TO GO FOR IT. I SPENT $5,000 ON IMPROV COMEDY CLASSES. I GOT TO GET MY MONEY'S WORTH. SO, if that sounds good to you, come on down to the Climate Town Patreon page and consider throwing us a couple of bucks a month to help us keep the lights on. I would really appreciate it. Okay. I have not tried marijuana. Uh I have never used it at any time. Did you hear that pop?

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*Источник: https://ekstraktznaniy.ru/video/52225*