Amtrak riders had a pretty rough Fourth of July weekend, at least judging by the talk of delays and outages in my Twitter feed. Vox.com's Max Fisher summed up the sentiment best: "Amtrak is a heavily-subsidized rail service with Russian quality at Swiss prices. It is the shame of the developed world." As it turns out, he was being a little too generous.

There are two major forces behind Amtrak's poor performance. The first is that Amtrak doesn't own most of the track it runs on, but leases it from a panoply of freight rail companies. You might think that would be a perfect recipe for finger-pointing and buck-passing whenever a problem arises, and you'd be absolutely right!