Basic Amtrak Thoughts

Having recently taken the California Zephyr, Amtrak's Chicago-Bay Area service, for approximately half its length on a trip to the Rockies (as well as a lengthy set of experiences previously in my life, of course), I have some thoughts on train travel in the US that I wanted to share. 1. Timeliness is a Huge IssueAmtrak has significant issues with not owning its track and with not getting priority over freight because of that (which it's supposed to). These are structural problems that operations can't be expected to magically solve. That said, I boarded my train in Galesburg, IL half an hour late, despite being only the third station stop out of the origin in Chicago. For a train with dozens of later stops, that's a really bad start. And don't get me started on the poor folks who were waiting for the Southwest Chief, which at the time we departed were still waiting on a train already 6 hours late and projected to be 8.Again, Amtrak has serious structural problems that the actual…