Wendover Blames Freight Railroads. It Misses the Law That Was Supposed to Stop Them.

Wendover Productions' Why Trains Suck in America presents a persuasive explanation for America's failing passenger rail system: freight companies own the tracks, passenger trains take second place, infrastructure is expensive, and Amtrak receives too little money to compete with European railways.

The underlying problems are real. But the explanation is considerably less reliable than its confident presentation suggests.

The video compares incompatible railway statistics, turns a broad category of host-railroad delays into an apparent verdict against freight dispatchers, and presents a $151 billion infrastructure programme as though it were the price of constructing high-speed track. Most importantly, it overlooks a federal law that already requires freight railroads to give Amtrak passenger trains priority.

I am not defending Amtrak's performance. I am challenging the evidence used to explain why it performs so badly. The difference matters because the video makes an institutional failure look almost inevitable.

1. France's 14,000 trains are not 14,000 Amtrak-style services

Wendover compares approximately 300 daily Amtrak trains with 14,000 daily SNCF services in France. The implication is that France operates nearly 47 times as many trains despite having a much smaller population.

There is a serious problem with that comparison.

Amtrak's own FY2016 fact sheet confirms that it operated more than 300 trains daily. However, a 2016 French National Assembly report breaks down the French railway figures into four categories:

• Approximately 7,500 TER regional trains.
• More than 6,000 Transilien suburban and commuter trains.
• Approximately 300 TET conventional long-distance trains.
• Approximately 800 TGV high-speed trains.

The French figure includes regional and suburban services that are not equivalent to Amtrak's intercity network.

A much closer, although still imperfect, comparison would be the 300 TET and 800 TGV services against Amtrak's more than 300 daily trains.

That changes the apparent comparison from approximately 47-to-1 to roughly 3.7-to-1.

France still operates substantially more long-distance and high-speed services. But the original comparison dramatically exaggerates the difference by counting millions of commuter and regional journeys in one country's total while excluding their American equivalents.

This is not a minor statistical qualification. The comparison is one of the video's principal demonstrations of American railway failure.

Sources: Amtrak FY2016 fact sheet and French National Assembly railway report.

2. The 98.6% delay figure does not establish 98.6% freight interference

The video's strongest accusation against freight operators rests on its California Zephyr example.

Wendover states that Amtrak attributed only 1.4% of the route's delays to itself, with the other 98.6% attributed to the companies owning the tracks.

It then explains that freight companies prioritize their own trains, forcing Amtrak passengers to wait.

The problem is that these are not necessarily the same thing.

The US Bureau of Transportation Statistics defines host-railroad delays broadly. Its category includes track and signal failures, power failures, freight-train interference, commuter-train interference and routing delays.

These are different causes requiring different solutions.

A freight dispatcher deliberately holding a passenger train for a freight service is not the same problem as a defective signal, damaged track, maintenance restriction or power failure.

The transcript does not provide the underlying route-level dataset or explain the precise unit used to calculate the 1.4% and 98.6% figures.

The Department of Transportation's Inspector General examined delays on the Coast Starlight and Amtrak Cascades routes in 2010. It found that host railroads were responsible for most delays on those routes, but also distinguished between freight interference and slow orders. Freight interference accounted for approximately 20–40% of delay minutes in several earlier years, while slow orders accounted for roughly 20–30%.

Slow orders are speed restrictions imposed when track conditions or maintenance work prevent normal operating speeds.

The Inspector General also found that Amtrak's delay-coding process depended on conductors manually assigning causes. Amtrak acknowledged that identifying the root cause could be subjective. In one sample of 55 train runs, a host railroad questioned approximately 8% of the reported delay minutes, although only a small proportion of daily entries were challenged overall.

This does not invalidate Amtrak's figures. It does mean they should not be treated as an independently established verdict on individual freight dispatching decisions.

The latest FRA reporting illustrates the distinction. In FY2026 Q2, the California Zephyr's three leading reported delay categories included freight-train interference (3,993 minutes), unused recovery time (3,244 minutes) and locomotive failures (1,730 minutes).

Freight interference is a genuine problem. It is not the entire explanation.

Sources: BTS delay classifications, DOT Inspector General report, and FRA FY2026 Q2 performance report.

3. The video overlooks the federal law requiring passenger-train priority

This is the most consequential omission.

American federal law already gives Amtrak passenger trains preference over freight transportation.

Under 49 U.S.C. §24308(c), intercity passenger transportation operated by or for Amtrak has priority over freight trains when using railway lines, junctions and crossings, except in emergencies and subject to the Surface Transportation Board's authority to grant relief where passenger priority would materially harm freight service.

The provision dates to 1973.

In other words, Congress had already recognised the problem Wendover describes and established a legal obligation intended to address it.

Why, then, do freight trains continue to delay passengers?

Because having a legal right and enforcing it are two different things.

The Congressional Research Service reported in January 2025 that only the US Attorney General can bring a direct lawsuit to enforce this statutory priority provision. Before July 2024, only one such lawsuit had been brought, in 1979.

Separate performance rules introduced in 2021 gave the Surface Transportation Board additional investigative and enforcement powers.

Under those rules, customer on-time performance below 80% for two consecutive quarters can trigger an investigation. The Board can award damages when a host railroad is found to have failed to provide the legally required passenger priority.

The record was hardly impressive.

In the fourth quarter of FY2024, only 10 of 43 Amtrak routes met the 80% performance standard. Thirty-five routes had failed the standard for two consecutive quarters. Yet the Sunset Limited investigation was the first use of these enforcement powers since the standards took effect, and the Board had imposed no penalties or other remedies by the end of 2024.

Then something important happened.

In July 2024, the Department of Justice sued Norfolk Southern, alleging that it repeatedly failed to give Amtrak trains priority on the Crescent route.

Norfolk Southern controlled dispatching over 1,140 miles of the 1,377-mile route.

In September 2025, the company agreed to a settlement requiring it to:

• Give Amtrak trains the highest priority.
• Train employees to comply with passenger-train priority requirements.
• Obtain supervisory approval for non-emergency dispatching decisions that deny Amtrak priority.
• Provide delay records to the Department of Justice.
• Have its compliance executive certify compliance annually.

The Department of Justice reported that Crescent-route delay minutes declined by 53% between 2024 and 2025.

The settlement did not establish liability, and the reduction is not a controlled experiment proving that the lawsuit alone caused the improvement. Nevertheless, it demonstrates that enforcement can produce concrete operational commitments.

This changes the central question.

The problem is not simply that freight companies own the tracks and Amtrak has no power. Passenger priority is already written into federal law. The more revealing question is why that right went so long without meaningful enforcement.

Wendover spends considerable time explaining private track ownership but never examines this institutional failure.

That is a substantial omission.

Sources: 49 U.S.C. §24308, Congressional Research Service, January 2025, and Department of Justice Norfolk Southern settlement, September 2025.

4. France's railway ownership is more complicated than the video suggests

Wendover explains France's passenger priority by saying that its national railway company owns all the tracks.

That description collapses three distinct responsibilities.

The French State owns the national railway network. SNCF Réseau manages the infrastructure, including traffic management and track access. SNCF Voyageurs operates passenger services.

Both companies belong to the publicly owned SNCF group, but infrastructure management and train operation are separate functions. French law provides for independence in essential infrastructure-management decisions.

This is an important distinction.

France's advantage is not simply that its passenger operator owns its tracks and can favour itself. It has a publicly owned infrastructure system with a separate network manager responsible for allocating access and managing railway traffic.

That is a different institutional arrangement from the American system.

The video also uses the difference between freight rail's market share in America and Europe to explain railway congestion.

It quotes figures of 38% in the United States and 8% in Europe.

Those numbers come from a 2007 academic study by Jose Vassallo and Mark Fagan, using 2000 data. The measure was freight transported by rail in tonne-kilometres, not the percentage of railway capacity occupied by freight trains.

More importantly, the study estimated that approximately 83% of the difference resulted from inherent factors, principally geography, shipment distance and commodity mix.

Only 17% was attributed to public-policy differences.

The researchers estimated that eliminating the identified policy gap would increase Europe's freight-rail share from 8% to approximately 13%, not 38%.

This does not mean passenger priority is irrelevant. The study explicitly identifies it as one of the policy factors.

But the video uses a freight-market-share statistic as evidence of track congestion without explaining the underlying differences in geography and freight composition.

It also presents France's taxpayer support as approximately half the operating cost of every journey.

The public accounts are more complicated.

A 2026 FIPECO analysis of 2024 spending identifies:

• €8.1 billion in operating contributions from regional authorities and Île-de-France Mobilités, principally supporting TER and Transilien services.
• €2.9 billion in state support for local railway infrastructure operating costs, Intercités and freight.
• €7.4 billion in separate investment subsidies.

These figures demonstrate substantial public support, but they do not establish a uniform 50% taxpayer contribution to every passenger journey.

The FIPECO analysis also explicitly states that it measures public expenditure rather than evaluating the efficiency of that expenditure. SNCF disputes the aggregation of different spending categories.

The comparison with Amtrak therefore needs more than a single percentage.

Sources: Légifrance, Article L2111-1, French Transport Regulatory Authority, Vassallo and Fagan, Transportation (2007), and FIPECO's 2024 taxpayer expenditure analysis.

5. The $151 billion figure is not the price of building high-speed track

The video's argument against building a new Northeast Corridor high-speed railway relies heavily on a $151 billion Amtrak estimate.

It divides this amount by the corridor's length to produce approximately $320 million per mile, or $60,000 per foot.

The arithmetic is not the main problem. The description of what the money buys is.

Amtrak's own FY2016 business plan describes the $151 billion figure as a multi-decade capital investment strategy, expressed in constant 2011 dollars, intended to improve and expand the Northeast Corridor.

The strategy contained two distinct programmes.

The Northeast Corridor Upgrade Program (2015–2030) was intended to bring existing infrastructure into a state of good repair, improve capacity-constrained sections and permit speeds of up to 160 mph on selected segments.

Next Generation High-Speed Rail (2025–2040) was a longer-term programme involving new and existing alignments, with a proposed maximum speed of 220 mph.

The investment programme therefore included existing infrastructure, repairs, capacity improvements and a future high-speed network.

It was not simply the price of laying a mile of French-standard high-speed track.

Dividing the total cost of a multi-decade programme by the corridor's length does not produce a meaningful construction cost per mile of high-speed railway.

The video then proposes upgrading existing infrastructure as a more economical solution.

That may be a sensible direction, but the episode never supplies a comparable project-level cost estimate for that alternative.

Nor does briefly reaching 125 mph establish that trains could maintain that speed throughout the Washington–New York journey. Maximum speed and average journey speed are different things.

The $151 billion comparison makes new high-speed rail look prohibitively expensive without establishing what the money actually purchases or what a realistic alternative would cost.

Amtrak's original plan is available here: FY2016 Budget and Business Plan, NEC Capital Investment Strategy.

6. Amtrak's funding problem was more complicated even in 2016

The video ends by describing Amtrak as a neglected child of American transportation that simply receives no money.

The actual financial position was more complicated.

Amtrak's own FY2016 fact sheet reported that it covered nearly 94% of its operating costs through ticket sales, state-partner payments and other revenue.

It reported approximately $3.2 billion in total revenue against $4.3 billion in combined capital and operating expenses.

That does not mean Amtrak was adequately funded. It means the distinction between operating costs and capital investment matters.

Amtrak could cover most of its operating costs while still facing an enormous infrastructure and equipment investment gap.

Congress changed the funding structure in FY2017, dividing appropriations between two major business lines:

• The Northeast Corridor, which is operationally self-sufficient but has substantial capital requirements.
• The National Network, which has relatively modest capital requirements because freight railroads own and maintain most of its tracks, but incurs annual operating deficits of several hundred million dollars.

The Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act of 2021 then changed Amtrak's statutory mission from minimizing federal subsidies to maximizing the benefits of federal investment.

It provided $22 billion in advance capital appropriations for FY2022–2026. Those funds are generally unavailable to cover operating costs.

By FY2025, Amtrak reported $4.7 billion in federal paid-in capital, including $2.4 billion in regular annual appropriations, with the remainder coming primarily from the infrastructure legislation and other supplemental funding.

Yet Amtrak still reported recurring operating losses and dependence on federal assistance.

The distinction is important: more capital investment does not automatically solve operating deficits, dispatching conflicts or poor service.

The latest published FRA performance report, covering FY2026 Q2, recorded:

• 75% customer on-time performance systemwide.
• 62% for long-distance services.
• 67% for the California Zephyr.

The modern measurement counts passengers arriving within 15 minutes of their scheduled destination time. The video's 2016 figures used an older train-arrival measure that allowed up to 30 minutes for journeys exceeding 551 miles.

Those historical and current percentages cannot be treated as a direct performance trend.

The underlying reliability problem remains. But the explanation is not simply that Amtrak receives no money.

Sources: Amtrak FY2016 financial fact sheet, Congressional Research Service, Amtrak FY2025 audited financial statements, and FRA FY2026 Q2 report.

Verdict: America has a railway governance problem, not just a railway geography problem

Wendover identifies genuine weaknesses in American passenger rail. Freight companies control much of the infrastructure Amtrak uses, freight interference causes real delays, and the Northeast Corridor requires enormous investment.

But the video repeatedly makes the evidence more dramatic than it deserves.

Its comparison with France counts commuter and regional trains as though they were equivalent to Amtrak's intercity services. Its 98.6% figure does not establish that freight dispatching caused 98.6% of the delays. Its $151 billion figure is a multi-decade infrastructure programme, not the construction price of a mile of high-speed track.

And its explanation of freight priority leaves out the most important institutional fact: federal law already requires passenger priority, but enforcement has historically been remarkably weak.

The 2025 Norfolk Southern settlement demonstrates that this legal obligation can be translated into concrete operational requirements. That is a more actionable finding than simply telling Americans that freight companies own the tracks and passenger rail is therefore doomed.

Geography, urban density and construction costs matter. Public funding matters. Freight infrastructure matters.

But so do laws, regulators, dispatching decisions and accountability.

A passenger railway cannot compete when the institutions responsible for protecting its access fail to enforce the rules governing that access.

Wendover leaves its audience with a story about an America that cannot afford European trains.

The more uncomfortable story is that America already has some of the legal tools needed to protect its passenger trains, yet has repeatedly failed to use them.

That is the failure worth investigating.

References

1. Why Trains Suck in America — Wendover Productions, 2016. The original work under review, including its train-count comparisons, delay attribution, infrastructure costs and funding argument.
2. Amtrak FY16 Ridership & Revenue Fact Sheet — Amtrak, April 17, 2017. Establishes the 300-plus daily train count, 31.3 million passengers and 94% operating-cost coverage.
3. Rapport d'information n° 4154 — French National Assembly, 2016. Separates French daily railway services into regional, commuter, conventional long-distance and high-speed categories.
4. Amtrak On-Time Performance Trends and Hours of Delay by Cause — Bureau of Transportation Statistics, updated 2026. Defines host-railroad delays and documents the historical on-time measurement system.
5. Amtrak Cascades and Coast Starlight Routes: Implementation of New Metrics and Standards is Key to Improving On-Time Performance — Department of Transportation Inspector General, September 23, 2010. Examines actual host-railroad delay causes and the limitations of manual delay attribution.
6. Intercity Passenger Rail: Federal Policy and Programs — Congressional Research Service, January 8, 2025. Explains statutory passenger priority, enforcement failures, federal funding arrangements and railway performance standards.
7. 49 U.S.C. §24308 — Use of Facilities and Providing Services to Amtrak — United States Code, current through September 2026. Establishes the statutory priority of passenger trains and the Surface Transportation Board's investigative and remedial authority.
8. Norfolk Southern Agrees to Give Amtrak Trains Highest Priority — US Department of Justice, September 9, 2025. Documents the settlement, dispatching obligations and reported 53% reduction in Crescent-route delay minutes.
9. Nature or Nurture: Why Do Railroads Carry Greater Freight Share in the United States than in Europe? — Jose Vassallo and Mark Fagan, Transportation, March 2007. Finds that geography, shipment distance and commodity mix explain most of the historical US–Europe freight-rail share difference.
10. Code des transports, Article L2111-1 — French Government, version February 22, 2026. Establishes state ownership of the national railway network and SNCF Réseau's infrastructure-management role.
11. La séparation comptable des activités ferroviaires — French Transport Regulatory Authority. Explains the institutional separation between railway infrastructure management and train operation.
12. Le coût de la SNCF pour les contribuables en 2024 — FIPECO, January 15, 2026. Breaks down French taxpayer contributions to railway operating expenses and capital investment, while explicitly distinguishing expenditure measurement from efficiency evaluation.
13. FY16 Budget and Business Plan — Amtrak, 2016. Establishes the actual scope and multi-decade structure of the $151 billion Northeast Corridor capital investment strategy.
14. FY2025 Management Discussion and Consolidated Financial Statements — Amtrak, 2025. Documents federal funding, IIJA capital restrictions, annual appropriations and continuing operating losses.
15. FY2026 Q2 Performance and Service Quality Report — Federal Railroad Administration, July 2026. Provides current passenger-weighted punctuality figures and route-specific delay classifications, including the California Zephyr.

Tighten the central thesisClarify the French train comparison