Silver Meteor's Florence, SC-Fayetteville, NC Slow Zone

I've noticed over the past week or so that there have been a few days, including last night, where the northbound Silver Meteor takes an outrageous 3 hours to travel between Florence, SC and Fayetteville, NC when the trip is supposed to take an hour and a half according to the timetable. This would seem to be a regular delay caused by CSX, except that Amtrak posts them as on time or even early arriving into all stations north of Fayetteville and posting the scheduled arrival times 3-4 hours later than the times posted in the timetable, as though this was scheduled. Is this just a glitch with Amtrak's computers or is there really something going on?

Murjax wrote:I've noticed over the past week or so that there have been a few days, including last night, where the northbound Silver Meteor takes an outrageous 3 hours to travel between Florence, SC and Fayetteville, NC when the trip is supposed to take an hour and a half according to the timetable. This would seem to be a regular delay caused by CSX, except that Amtrak posts them as on time or even early arriving into all stations north of Fayetteville and posting the scheduled arrival times 3-4 hours later than the times posted in the timetable, as though this was scheduled. Is this just a glitch with Amtrak's computers or is there really something going on?

Trackwork between Savannah and Florence - canceling the Palmetto from Mon-Thurs south of Florence (and apparently delaying the Silver Meteor)

Not sure why it's being delayed north of there though, unless it's residual delays from that trackwork.

That's not the worst part - once a fast train is delayed, the dispatchers must find a fast "slot" for that train in the schedule where there isn't supposed to be one. Late trains get later. At least an intermodal or priority freight has financial incentive to make up time. To my knowledge, Amtrak does not present a railroad with competitive payments relative to the speed/space their trains occupy.

A few months ago I could agree with those of you who are complaining about the on time performance of train 97, The
Silver Meteor.
Today, I do not agree, item in January train 97 has arrived and departed Kissimmee (first stop south of Orlando) within 45
minutes of its scheduled time of 1:32 PM on 17 of 23 days. In December 97 arrived and departed Kissimmee within 45
minutes on 27 out of 31 days. Why did I allow them 45 minutes? It is simple because the southbound running time from
Kissimmee to Miami is 47 minutes longer than the northbound running time so it should be relatively easy for them to run
off 45 minutes on this trip.
As far as this train is concerned, I think CSX has done a decent job in its handling of this train enroute from Washington to
Kissimmee and on to Miami. Most of the days when it was badly delayed, the delays occurred right in New York where for
some reason Amtrak was unable to have the train ready for departure on time.
There are cushions at both ends of the runs for the Meteor so if the train was 45 minutes or less departing its initial
terminal, it should reach its final terminal on time.
Any train of this nature making a run of 1389 miles (New York - Miami) with over a thousand miles on single track railroad
and maintaining an OTP like I cited above is not doing too bad in my opinion.
What is the reason for this improvement? I am not sure, maybe the slowdown in business resulting in fewer freight trains,
maybe somebody high up in CSX issued orders to get the passenger trains over the road without excessive delays or maybe
a combination of both. I don't know and maybe nobody on here knows.
I expect to continue to watch this one train (97) on a daily basis at Kissimmee at least for a while.
Noel Weaver

For the hours I was awake on my recent NB trip on the Meteor, the only time we stopped anywhere other than a station was somewhere not too far north of Savannah where we waited about 5 minutes to let another SB passenger train pass. We arrived in Union Station about 10 minutes earlier than scheduled.

On another note, we stopped in VA to pick up some crew members (that's what I heard on conductor's radio). After about 3 minutes when we still weren't back underway, the conductor jumped up from her table in the lounge clearly annoyed that things were taking so long. Needless to say, we were underway within a minute or two of that happening.