> Can’t they just pay for priority?

With what money? Oh, the extra money they could be allocated by… Congress?

Amtrak sells tickets.

Demanding that a passenger railway be self-funding while also trying to massively increase its scope is... not a path for success. Unless I'm wrong you know of any continent-scale railways that bootstrapped themselves into success recently...?

A possible strategy is to use money from ticket sales to pay for priority, boosting on-time performance which increases the competitiveness of their product.

Do you really think no one has thought of this?

And for a large portion of their routes are already overpriced and less convenient than almost any other means of travel (except for a handful of actually reasonably-priced routes. A local route on Amtrak costs almost $100 for a one way ticket traveling <200mi A bus ticket for the same route is $30. The bus takes an hour longer. I want amtrak to thrive, but they need to attract customers, not drive more away with higher prices.

System-wide load factor in Feb 22 was 38%. This is not competitive. Perhaps decreasing delays would boost ridership, making tickets cheaper.