Wick won't stick

As reported in the March issue of Trains, Amtrak’s new president, Wick Moorman, has gone on the record with his intention of having a short tenure there. Mr. Moorman, certainly the most capable and successful railroader to hold the position in years, also intends to spend at least some of the time looking for his successor. If Moorman has his way, his successor will be somebody who is ready to follow the new directions Moorman puts in place, and will also be ready to take the helm sometime in 2018, at the latest.

Whether this short tenure is good or bad for Amtrak will depend to a significant degree on whether Moorman succeeds in finding a worthy successor—in my opinion, no easy task.

As far as putting new directions in place, I like what I have heard so far. His testimony the week of February 13, 2017, before the Senate Surface Transportation and Merchant Marine Infrastructure, Safety and Security committee is a good example.

Moorman sees the current administration’s push for national infrastructure improvements as a golden opportunity for Amtrak to spend money on renewing its aging fleet of locomotives and cars, and on renewing and rebuilding old bridges and track. He uses the term “investment,” but in private corporate terms this is really just capital outlay.

As I see it, however, repair and rebuilding of existing infrastructure, at least in Amtrak’s case, only brings us back to where we should have been ten years ago. The items on his list that constitute new infrastructure, as opposed to repaired or upgraded, are fewer than the long list handed to the committee. For example, new Hudson River tunnels as opposed to rebuilt locomotives or even as opposed to refurbishing Chicago Union Station.

New cars that replace, one-for-one, cars that are older than the Amtrak heritage fleet was when Amtrak was young, do not send Amtrak in a new direction, merely in the same direction for an indeterminate longer future period.

Another thing I do like about Moorman: He wants to shorten the environmental review process for new construction, a slow thorn in the side of any project that needs to do more than just refurbish track. He also says he would like to partner more with states and private investors to creatively fund new service projects and find ways for private enterprise to profit from those added services. That’s a big thumbs up for me!

I’d like to see Amtrak take a look at how private logistics experts see the movement of material and finished product from mine to consumer as one seamless task in which the freight railroads may be only partly involved. For instance, in the same way that freight railroads have to be ready to transport grain from a harvest before it gets backed up in the elevators, Amtrak needs to start forecasting. It needs to know where its next riders are coming from and when they will be ready to move from the station, how long it takes them to get to their destinations, and exactly when it is most convenient for them to alight from the train—not at the convenience of an Amtrak schedule, but at the convenience of the riders. It needs to be able to take advantage of seasonal trends as well as short term opportunities, like conventions and sporting events, that will draw people to look for convenient alternatives to road or air travel.

Amtrak can’t do this with its current level of car and locomotive availability, or with its current route structure. There’s a need for slack in the car supply to accommodate such a forward-looking philosophy. American passenger railroads never seem to have come to grips with this kind of thinking.

So kudos to Moorman for pushing Congress to spend more on Amtrak’s infrastructure. But if he doesn’t plan to stick around, he’s going to have a tough time convincing all those senators and representatives that the next guy up will be ready to spend the appropriations he needs and in the quantities, that will do Amtrak any good. Or even that the next guy up will agree with what he’s telling the Senate now.

©2017 – 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.)