Working with the bare minimum

It’s a current tenet of just about any business: Work with the bare minimum to keep your bottom line in the black. In manufacturing, this means both keeping your staff small and keeping your inventory smaller. In store retail, it means stocking only the goods that will sell. It means internet retail is going to result in a better bottom line because staffing is unnecessary and, in many cases, logistics can be left to somebody else. Transportation uses the minimum number of trucks, trains, buses, or rail cars needed to get product and passenger from start to destination.

You can count those businesses that don’t work with the bare minimum on one hand. Because of the public’s love affair with high tech and the willingness of investors to throw cash into tech, there are those cutting-edge, high-technology companies that seem to have unlimited staff, physical plant, and cash to do just about anything they can think of. Think Tesla, SpaceX, even Apple; though not so much now.

Amtrak’s not one of those, and hasn’t been in its forty-five-year history. Amtrak has never had enough of the following: Routes, locomotives, coaches, diners, sleepers, lounges, baggage cars, personnel, cash, competent management, politicians on its side, public support, incentive to do better… stop me now because I could go on.

Yet Amtrak continues to amaze me. The Alstom deal appearing above this post on my main page is one of these amazements. Another amazement is mentioned at the end of this post. It’s about who will head up Amtrak for the next few years. Despite the difficulties, there has always been somebody who is willing to get behind Amtrak and push it along towards the 21st century. Yes, I meant that. Amtrak has never gotten past 1999, and isn’t in a partying mood.

But Amtrak’s not the only government funded entity that’s stuck in the 20th century. Think Interstate Highway System. Think Air Traffic Control. Odd they both have to do with transportation, isn’t it? The federal communications people have just pulled themselves out of the last century by a hair. The Forest Service, by some accounts, another century behind.

I’m sure there are other aspects of America that are stuck in the 20th century. Could we do better with what we have? Undoubtedly! But raising new taxes isn’t going to promote growth when waste hasn’t been conquered. And certainly, withdrawing funding from an enterprise as important to an overall comprehensive transportation policy as the only national intercity rail network would be another iteration of the special kind of insanity often practiced by Congress. (I’m sure I’ll get some comment that many commuter agencies are actually intercity operations—at least in larger metro areas.)

Here’s my opinion: Working with the bare minimum does build some character. It causes us to stop and decide whether our ideas are too extravagant and whether the resources couldn’t be better used elsewhere. From that point of view, Amtrak has built character.

Working with the bare minimum will never create a passenger rail network that we can be proud of, because we know that the bare minimum will never let us throw on the frills that will make the network stand out. People may come from different parts of the world to ride Amtrak because of the long rides and the beautiful American landscape, but they will never come from all parts of the world to ride Amtrak because the trains are something that can’t be found elsewhere.

Not unless we let it go so far that it becomes the only antique intercity network in the world.

Now for the leadership news that’s not off the topic of working with the bare minimum: Amtrak, on August 19, 2016, announced its new president. Since Amtrak’s current president, Joe Boardman, has been accused by many pundits of doing the bare minimum for Amtrak, the topic fits. The new president, starting today, I’m told, will be Wick Moorman, former Norfolk Southern executive chairman and, before that, its CEO and president. I can practically hear the sigh of relief; a functionally whole railroad executive has been chosen. Most think Moorman, given the right tools and some support from Congress, can do excellent things for Amtrak.

Watch these pages.

©2016 – C. A. Turek – mistertrains@gmail.com

(Charles A. Turek is a writer and novelist based in Albuquerque, NM. After four decades working in areas of the insurance industry related to transportation, he now writes on all aspects of American railroading. Charles is a political conservative but believes in public funding of passenger rail as a part of the federal government’s constitutionally conservative obligation to provide for defense and public infrastructure so that private enterprise may flourish.)