AMTRAK DELAYED. Although the expanded Illinois Amtrak service attracts riders, freight-train-interference frustrations threaten repeat business.

Despite the best efforts of the Amtrak crew, a number of factors coalesced to ake [St. Louis-Chicago] Train No. 302 arrive late to Chicago on the day your Getting Around reporter went along for part of the approximately 300-mile ride.

Twenty-nine minutes were lost early in the trip as the train stood still waiting for permission to enter the territory controlled by the Kansas City Southern Railway. Amtrak conductor Mike White repeatedly tried to call a dispatcher for the Kansas City Southern in Shreveport, La., but the dispatcher did not answer his phone for almost a half hour.

The old Alton Route has been a disaster for Amtrak for some time, with a number of people fired account some horrible decisions during last December's snows. But the difficulty raising the dispatcher is evidence of a breakdown in basic discipline. PASSENGER TRAINS run on SCHEDULES. Trains are not supposed to move without CLEARANCE. The request of a PASSENGER TRAIN for CLEARANCE is one of these predictable things, almost as routine as putting the coffee on just before signing the transfer. Does it really require a FEDERAL CASE to get railroad management to manage the railroad properly?

"We have struggled with mediocre to dismal on-time performance on our three Downstate corridors," George Weber, acting bureau chief of railroads at the Illinois Department of Transportation, told Illinois House lawmakers at a hearing last month. "On the St. Louis corridor, we are lucky to have a train reach its final destination in an on-time fashion 50 percent of the time."

Weber said it may take years to achieve consistent reliable service. The main challenges include freight traffic, especially between Chicago and Joliet, the poor condition of tracks that require speed reductions in many locations and Amtrak equipment breakdowns, Weber said.

"The outcome of our efforts is not in our control," Weber said, referring to the unenthusiastic cooperation on the part of some freight railroads that contracted with Amtrak to use their rails.

Despite a 1971 federal law that requires the freight railroads to give priority to Amtrak trains, some of the freight carriers are flexing their muscles. Last year, the Canadian National Railway tried to pull out of an agreement with Amtrak to allow one of the additional round trips to St. Louis and to withhold access to the Carbondale route. The railroad subsequently backed down when U.S. Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) and other lawmakers got involved.

Is it that difficult to mix passenger and freight trains, particularly with the potential for public expenditure on railroad improvements to be more cost-effective than expansion of the highway or air traffic control networks? Canadian National's reluctance to work with Amtrak does not bode well for a proposed Chicago-Rockford-Galena service.