“Earlier this year, on an Amtrak train from Northern Virginia to Sanford, Florida, passengers repeatedly called the police during the train’s 20-hour delay. ‘For those of you that are calling the police,’ the conductor had to announce, ‘we are not holding you hostage.’ That debacle was caused by a freight train ahead of them, which had crashed into an empty car parked on the tracks in rural South Carolina. Nothing you can do about that. A train just has to wait until whatever’s in front of it is gone.” — Kaitlyn Tiffany, The Atlantic, 21 Nov. 2023