News Flash: Most Trains Were Late In July

By Jim Mathews / President & CEO

If you were one of the three million or so people riding Amtrak in July, you already knew this, but Amtrak data made public earlier this month now make it official – the vast majority of Amtrak trains were late in July, and on-time performance deteriorated systemwide.

Of the 47 distinct services Amtrak operates, only seven reached the 80 percent Customer On-Time Performance (Customer OTP) standard set by Federal regulations in late 2020 and which took effect in mid-2021. Five of those seven on-time services were state-supported, with the highly reliable Keystone as the only Northeast Corridor route to meet the standard, alongside the City of New Orleans, clocking in as the only one of the 15 long-distance routes to make the grade.

Throughout the system timeliness took a beating, data published by Amtrak show. The typical late Amtrak rider was an hour late in July, up from the 55-minute 12-month average. A bit more than two-thirds of Amtrak trains were on time in July, compared with about three-quarters during the 12 prior months.

At 72.4 percent, the non-NEC corridor routes collectively came the closest to meeting the standard, but July’s performance was still four points worse than the 12-month average. Northeast Corridor routes were considerably worse, and didn’t even break 70 percent in July – a full ten percentage points worse than the NEC’s 12-month average. And the long-distance routes, which had been seeing modest improvements in the first part of this year, suffered a dismal July, tumbling 13 percentage points to just under 44 percent on-time.

Of particular note: the wildly successful new Borealis run between Minneapolis-St. Paul and Chicago, which has been crushing ridership expectations since it launched only a couple of short months ago, was only running at 43.4 percent on-time in July, mostly due to slow-orders.

Five of the 15 long-distance routes saw their Customer OTP dip into the 20s. The Silver Meteor was the best of that bad category at 28.3 percent; the California Zephyr came in at 27.1 percent, as did the Empire Builder. The Southwest Chief posted 22.5 percent Customer OTP in July, and the Silver Star finished a sick fifth at only 22.1 percent. In each instance, these results were well off their 12-month average. The Builder, for example, had been running at about 55.2 percent Customer OTP for the most recent 12 months before July.

For the long-distance services, while only the City of New Orleans actually notched acceptable Customer OTP – 82.9 percent, five percentage points better than its 12-month average – a few routes managed to improve on their 12-month performance. At 66 percent, the Auto Train was seven percentage points better, and the Sunset Limited (currently the subject of on-time and preference litigation at the Surface Transportation Board) was about five percentage points better at 60.2 percent.

For the long-distance routes, freight train interference and slow orders take most of the blame, with a smattering of host-responsible passenger-train interference codes on the Cardinal, Coast Starlight, and Silver Star. Despite widespread chatter across social media from passengers and railfans, locomotive-related delays did not figure prominently in any of the leading categories of delay minutes per 10,000 train miles, and overall for the past 12 months engine failures have only accounted for 50 delay minutes per 10,000 train miles – a shade more than three percent of all delay minutes recorded for the past 12 months.