No, the freights are NOT OK. US freight railways are responsible for the "precision scheduled railroading" brainworm that makes freight genuinely worse for anyt

No, the freights are NOT OK. US freight railways are responsible for the "precision scheduled railroading" brainworm that makes freight genuinely worse for anything that can be carried by truck and isn't good for anyone: 1. Freight customers spend longer waiting for their deliveries, and pay more money for them. As a result, a lot of mid-size freight customers have moved to trucking instead, and the market has shrunk. 2. To save money as less-valuable cargo is pruned from their networks, freight railroads have been downgrading their infrastructure from double- to single-track with sidings. This would be acceptable, except... 3. Freight trains have gotten longer and longer in order to reduce the crew needed to attend to a given amount of freight. Sidings on single-track routes are rarely long enough to accommodate mainline freight trains, so passenger rail gets delayed, and grade crossings stay closed for way longer. That last bit is actually why I personally complain about freight railroads. I am someone who has spent a good chunk of his 2026 lobbying Utah's state representatives to adopt the Rio Grande Plan[0]. You see, Salt Lake City is divided in thirds by UP freight mainlines, which get hourly freight through-traffic that paralyzes car and pedestrian traffic across the various sides of the city. The railroads themselves don't inconvenience passenger train traffic[1], but they absolutely make it miserable to walk, bike, or drive across the city, and we can't run any transit services parallel to the railroad for obvious reasons. Everything that has to cross the tracks reliably has to go over one of two rail-crossing bridges in the entirety of downtown. The reason why you are saying "a bus would be better" is primarily a matter of federal infrastructure spending. Buses get to ride on the Interstate Highway System for cheap, and government-provided highway infrastructure is significantly better for both freight and passenger traffic than the privately run railroads can offer. But at the same time, buses are a demonstrably worse answer to the question of "how do we get a bunch of people from one city to another" than trains or planes. Personally, if money was no object, I'd call for the government to run intercity rail corridors along highway rights of way with open interconnection, overhead catenary, passing tracks, and passenger-priority dispatching. These would specifically be open to both passenger and freight rail, specifically because both are suffering under the weight of hedge funds that moonlight as Class I freight railways. [0] The Rio Grande Plan is a citizen-led initiative that calls for building a train box in downtown Salt Lake City along 500 West and burying all heavy rail freight and passenger traffic inside of it. [1] ...because we built our own railroad parallel to the UP mainline. Amtrak's California Zephyr service is absolutely inconvenienced by Union Pacific, though - in fact, it's the worst delayed route in the entire network!