In the 1950s, the Milwaukee Road’s Olympian Hiawatha carried passengers from Minneapolis to Chicago in roughly seven hours. Today, Amtrak’s Empire Builder covers that same distance in just under eight. The New York Central once ran forty-two daily passenger trains between Buffalo and Cleveland, with the 187-mile trip taking three hours. Today, Amtrak’s Lake Shore Limited covers the same 187 miles in three and a half hours, if it’s on time, which it often isn’t. And the New York–Montreal run took nine hours in 1940; today’s Adirondack takes over thirteen.
These are particular examples of a general problem. Across the American rail network, passenger trains run slower today than they did before the Second World War. What happened?
None of the obvious explanations, like underinvestment in rail assets or the ubiquity of car culture, solve the puzzle. If car culture were determinative, we cannot explain why Europe maintains faster rail service than the United States, even though 74 percent of European intercity trips are taken by automobile, only modestly below America’s 85 percent. And political will cannot be the binding constraint either, since bipartisan infrastructure bills consistently include rail funding, but none have reversed the decline.
These explanations fail because they assume something has gone wrong. If we start instead with the premise that something has gone right, the puzzle solves itself. American passenger trains are slow because the United States established a framework after 1970 that made optimization for freight service inevitable. Private railroads, freed from mandatory passenger service, rationally invested in what paid: moving cargo. That optimization succeeded spectacularly: today, America moves over five thousand ton-miles of freight per person annually by rail, a rate nine times that of Europe’s and fifty-four times Japan’s.
Put another way, the United States has excellent intercity rail service... for freight. The United States features the most productive freight railroad in the world, and by optimizing for that, it has chosen not to pursue passenger speed. Doing both simultaneously on shared infrastructure is difficult, if not impossible. Four interlocking barriers—incentive structures, infrastructure standards, regulatory requirements, and operational arrangements—keep passenger speeds low: not by accident, but by design.