Amtrak ridership grew. Only 58% of trains hit the standard.
Summary
Federal regulation sets an 80% on-time performance standard for Amtrak, measured over any two consecutive quarters. FRA's latest quarterly report shows the railroad improving broadly in FY2026 Q1 -- ridership up 4.7% to 9.36 million, on-time performance up across every service line -- yet at the individual-train level, only 58% of trains met that standard across the two most recent quarters, and Long Distance service remained 14 points below it. The report attributes much of the shortfall to delays caused by the freight railroads that host most of Amtrak's routes.
Growth and the standard moved in the same direction, just not far enough
Broken out by service line, State Supported trains hit exactly 80%⧉ -- meeting the standard on the nose. The Northeast Corridor, at 78%, came close. Long Distance service, at 66%, remained well short despite an 8-point improvement over the year before. Individual routes told a starker story: Keystone (90%), Capitol Corridor (89%), and Pennsylvanian (89%) led; Southwest Chief (40%), Floridian (44%), and Lincoln/Missouri (51%) trailed furthest behind.
View data as table
| Federal minimum standard | 80% |
|---|---|
| Long Distance | 66% |
| Northeast Corridor | 78% |
| State Supported | 80% |
The train-level view is less forgiving than the averages
Service-line averages can mask how individual trains actually perform. Looking train-by-train across the two most recent quarters, 58% cleanly met⧉ the 80% standard, 25% fell short of it, and 17% didn't run in both quarters measured (making their two-quarter compliance impossible to assess). That means a plurality, but not a majority, of trains demonstrably hit the bar regulation sets for them.
View data as table
| Met the 80% standard | 58% |
|---|---|
| Did not meet the standard | 25% |
| Did not operate in both quarters | 17% |
Where the delays come from
's data points to a familiar culprit: Long Distance service, the worst-performing segment, also racked up the most delay minutes⧉ per 10,000 train miles of any service line. Among the freight railroads that host most Amtrak routes, CN-IC and Union Pacific caused the most host-responsible delay minutes; CPKC caused the least. Delays improved year-over-year at every major host railroad except two: CN-IC, where host-responsible delays rose 37%, and CPKC, where they rose 3%. For most hosts, freight-train interference was the single largest cause of Amtrak delays; for CN-IC and CPKC specifically, slow orders and passenger-train interference dominated instead.
The takeaway
- Growth and the on-time standard aren't the same measure. Ridership rose 4.7% and on-time performance improved across every service line -- but system-wide, only State Supported service actually reached the 80% federal standard.
- Train-level reality is tougher than the service-line average. Only 58% of individual trains cleanly met the 80% standard across both of the two most recent quarters.
- Long Distance is both the worst performer and the reason why. It had the lowest on-time performance (66%) and the most delay minutes per 10,000 train miles of any service line.
This report was retrieved via the Internet Archive after railroads.dot.gov returned HTTP 403 to direct automated requests; the underlying document is 's own official quarterly report. FY2026 Q1 covers October-December 2025 only; a train's two-quarter compliance is judged against the prior quarter (FY2025 Q4), not a full year. Figures for individual host railroads' delay minutes are described only qualitatively here (which railroads had the most/least, and the year-over-year direction) rather than with exact per-railroad minute counts, since the report presents those figures in a stacked chart format not cleanly extractable as precise per-category numbers from the source PDF. The report itself contains a minor internal inconsistency: its narrative text states Pennsylvanian's FY2026 Q1 Customer OTP as 86%, while its own data tables (cited twice) show 89%; this piece uses 89%, the figure the tables support.
Sources(1) ▾
- Federal Railroad Administration, Quarterly Report on the Performance and Service Quality of Intercity Passenger Train Operations, First Quarter of Fiscal Year 2026 (October 1, 2025-December 31, 2025) (2026-03-01) — 's statutorily required (PRIIA Section 207) quarterly report on Amtrak on-time performance, train delays, and ridership. Direct fetch attempts (WebFetch and curl) both returned HTTP 403 from railroads.dot.gov; retrieved instead via the Internet Archive Wayback Machine's June 6, 2026 capture of the same PDF, then converted with pdftotext -layout and read in full. railroads.dot.gov · original document
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The Federal Railroad Administration's latest quarterly report⧉ on Amtrak covers October through December 2025 (FY2026 Q1). Ridership grew across every service line, reaching 9.36 million total passengers, up 4.7% from a year earlier. On-time performance improved too, system-wide reaching 78%, up five points from the prior quarter. But federal regulation requires 80% on-time performance over any two consecutive quarters -- and at the individual-train level, only 58% of trains actually met that standard across the two most recent quarters.