“Amtrak is carefully monitoring the continued freight rail — rail labor contract negotiations. The negotiations don’t contain Amtrak or the Amtrak workforce. Whereas we’re hopeful that events will attain a decision, Amtrak has now begun phased changes to our service in preparation for a doable freight rail service interruption later this week,” Amtrak stated in an announcement.
Among the many routes being suspended are lengthy distance routes from Chicago to Los Angeles, Chicago to Seattle, Chicago to San Francisco and a portion of considered one of its routes that runs from Los Angeles to San Antonio.
Amtrak calls these “preliminary changes” and says it “may very well be adopted by impacts to all Lengthy Distance and most State-Supported routes.”
The labor dispute that would result in the primary nationwide railroad strike in 30 years may start as quickly as this Friday. About 60,000 union members who work for the railroad are set to go on strike, together with the engineers and conductors who make up the two-person crews on every practice. Though 45,000 different union members belong to unions which have reached tentative offers with the railroads, a strike by engineers and conductors would carry the freight rail system, which carries almost 30% of the nation’s freight, to a grinding halt.
Amtrak says a strike would “considerably impression” 21,000 route miles that it operates outdoors of the northeast. Within the northeast, the place Amtrak owns the tracks, the impacts could be extra minimal. Its high-speed Acela service, for example, wouldn’t be impacted, nevertheless it says a “small quantity” of its Northeast Regional departures could be.
Amtrak owns and keep about 700 miles of monitor, primarily within the Northeast Hall from Boston to Washington. However nearly all of the remaining 97% of Amtrak’s almost 22,000-mile system is on tracks owned and maintained by freight railroads, in accordance with the Affiliation of American Railroads.
CNN’s Vanessa Yurkevich contributed.
