This evening I learned of the passing of Jack Wilson, an operating manager for Amtrak at Los Angeles. While you often hear of Amtrak managerial foul-ups and inattention to problems, Jack was one of the “good guys”, and we really would have liked to have seen him in Chicago.
I wrote a tribute to him over at Trainorders.com, which is where I learned of his death (today, 2/17, apparently of a head injury). He’d been retired for a few years.
Let me tell you about Jack…
I didn’t know Jack at all as an Amtrak employee. But we were buddies back around his late teens (I have two or three years on him, age-wise), when he was growing up in Plainwell, Michigan. I will say that I learned a lot about railfanning by taking a few trips with Jack…we’d walk into towers and locomotive cabs like we owned them (and he might have–nobody ever kicked us out!), and–although I’d had plenty of cab rides and caboose rides in my own territory by that time–I took my first passenger trips of any size with Jack and the gang (various sizes) from the West Michigan Chapter of the NRHS…first diner experience, first dome rides, first ride behind steam, first times over a lot of railroads, first visits to many great railfan spots around Chicago. He had an old red Dodge that gave me my first experience at seeing three digits achieved on a speedometer. And yes, he knew his rules even then–signal rules for whatever railroad we were on or observing.
I’ll never forget how he quelled a riot on GTW’s Mohawk one day when we were late (stabbed by N&W in Chicago for over an hour) and the coach’s a/c wasn’t working. If Jack hear