Interesting article. Sorry he was on one of the very late EBs this Summer. As Fred stated, and most people don't realize, the significant majority of the track on the Hi-Line is single track. Most of Montana is a single track operation, and that is a long distance. Even with adding about 115 miles of double track and extra sidings 3 years ago in MT and ND BNSF is still faced with a growing freight operation that is at or above capacity much of the year. Sure, one solution is for BNSF to double track hundreds of additional miles, which given the wealth of its owner (Berkshire Hathaway) they likely could afford to do so, but those decisions are way above my pay grade and in the hands of people who are looking at the bottom line for their operation and not Amtrak. I do agree with Fred's comment that the BNSF dispatchers generally seem to do a good job giving the EBs priority throughout this trek, but one can only run so many trains so fast on the fixed assets available to them. As my local BNSF contact said and I shared in an earlier post, if they had the capacity, manpower and equipment in place right now, they could do considerably more business than they are currently handling on this route.
Raising the issue of needed maintenance is a good point. Mechanical things break or need regular planned maintenance and Amtrak does not have the rolling assets in place anymore to lose even a few Superliner cars without something being disrupted. No easy answer here at all, sad to say. I just glanced at tonight's "progress" by the EBs along this route and they are right in line with all of our discussions in their delays. #8(23) is almost 5 hours late and 7(23) is 2 1/2 hours late (with the Kootenai Sub still to go thru). Maybe the answer is running the Empire Builder on less than 7 days schedule after all and realistically set a schedule the EB's can make given the current and likely future realities of this route-gosh I would hate to see that happen, but what alternatives does Amtrak and the riding public have at this point?
