That's because there's a poison pill in the Amtrak world. With few exceptions, Amtrak doesn't own any of the rail network they use. They run on rails owned by BNSF, Norfolk-Southern, or Union Pacific.

It was on HN just two months ago. The One Tiny Law That Keeps Amtrak Terrible: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34336653

Amtrak trains could run on precise schedules--while probably slowing down cargo--and long routes would still be underutilized because most people don't want a more expensive days long train trip rather than a few hour flight.

Yes but properly speaking Amtrak should have cross-country high speed rail routes and lower costs than flying. Amtrak can't even imagine high speed rail as long as they are stuck renting routes where they are limited to 140km/h, less than half the speed of high speed rail in other countries. Even Amtrak's fastest lines, the Acela in the NE corridor, only manage 240 km/h along one or two sections.

We nationalized the passenger services that were losing money, that’s why the railroads wanted to get rid of them.

Most of Amtrak’s service runs on track they don’t own, at the mercy of the freight railroads for scheduling and track maintenance.

They are pressured to keep their long distance trains that lose money as a public good, but they aren’t given consistent public funding in return. We treat them as a company that should turn it own profit. We don’t expect the DOT to turn a profit on highways, because we recognize the greater economic impact of having useful highways.

The Northeast Corridor is the exception and notably seems to be the best performing part of the Amtrak network.

Seems to me like the standard American public-private practice of privatizing the gains and socializing the losses, and then complaining about how the government loses money.

> The Northeast Corridor is the exception and notably seems to be the best performing part of the Amtrak network.

And, interestingly, the worst part of the Northeast Corridor is the part that's not owned by Amtrak (the Metro North territory between NYC and New Haven).

> the standard American public-private practice of privatizing the gains and socializing the losses

It isn't only the US that suffers from this. The UK has a bad case of it and even Norway is in danger of doing it.

Same for France sadly... but we always take US worst ideas ;-)

Framing the comparison as cost-per-passenger-mile is unfair to Amtrak, though. Amtrak on the NE corridor enables many trips between nearby cities in ranges of tens of miles that are too short for an airline to serve. Using passenger-miles as the denominator misframes Amtrak's strength as a downside. Amtrak is serving a very useful service there in displacing those trips from cars or buses.

It's true that Amtrak isn't all that useful beyond the NE corridor, although that's as much a function of the scale of the US as of Amtrak itself.