David Gunn, former AMTRAK exec, had an interview with National Public Radio today. I will post a link later on, as NPR doesn’t provide a link till 0830 EST.
He was critical about the Administration’s desires to get rid of AMTRAK, particularly about selling off the NEC.
Give it a listen if you can.
Erik
I heard it this morning.
The best point he made, I thought, was about the folly of separating the assets of the NEC from the operation and the difficulty of coordinating maintenance and operations. Even in frt RRing, where schedule keeping isn’t as critical, getting track time for maintenance requires coordination and communication. Getting track time for program maintenance requires even more effort.
You beat me to it.
I’m not sure how the Feds plan to “privatize” Acela service or NEC trainsets… or who would buy the NEC.
It’s an interesting problem.
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5022721
Erik
In 1978, Paul Reistrup hired Marty Garelick away from the Milwaukee Road where he was VP Operations, to be the Chief Operating Officer at Amtrak. I’ve never discussed his years at Amtrak in any particular detail, but at a retired employees picnic several years ago, I recall Marty mentioning to me in passing that he was hired to try and figure out a way to separate the NEC from the rest of the operation. Reistrup was convinced, and Marty agreed, that the NEC was so different from the rest of Amtrak, that it was a continuing conflict attempting to operate what were in essence two completely different business models within the same organizational framework.
If I am recalling the comments correctly, “each operation distracted from the other, the capital needs were entirely different, the operating strategies entirely different, even the employee and management structures were different. They were separate distinct passenger railroad theories, physical plants and operating characteristics. We knew we could not effectively manage both, but we couldn’t figure out a way to get them apart and through the political process.”
Best regards, Michael Sol
After hearing this and many other sources on the subject, I’d have a tendency to believe the opinions of an experienced railroad man such as Gunn over the ideas of someone with little or no railroad experience, like his former boss.
As Gunn pointed out in the interview, running the NEC isn’t the same as a highway system.
[Open Acess Rears Its Ugly head Again]
Reistrup’s Recipe for a Rail Passenger PPP
No North American railroader has had broader experience with the theory and practice of intercity passenger train operations than Paul H. Reistrup. He was the Baltimore & Ohio’s chief passenger officer just prior to the creation of Amtrak; he served as Amtrak’s second president with a distinction that earned him Railway Age’s W. Graham claytor, Jr., Award for Distinguished Service to Passenger Transportation. More recently he served CSX Transportation as vice presidentpassenger integration. Last month he reappeared on the scene as chairman-elect of the Wilmington, Del.-based Railway Service Corp., and he went to Capitol Hill with a plan for pulling Amtrak out of its present quandary without pulling it to pieces. His appearance at a hearing of the House Subcommittee on Railroads was a follow-up, he said, to a letter RSC sent to the Amtrak Reform Council two years ago.
What Reistrup proposed was a privatelyfinanced pilot project to operate an existing Amtrak route in the Midwest to demonstrate the viability of separating operations from infrastructure under an RSC- crafted plan.
Reistrup was one of eight witnesses who made submissions to the committee on Sept. 21 [2005]. Another was Robert Serlin, president of Rail Infrastructure Management, LLC (whose plan for creating an Infrastructure Management Organization, to fund infrastructure maintenance and upgrades through tax-credit and bond-based financing, was described in detail in the October 2003 issue of Railway Age, p. 21. The renewal of RRIF loan authority in the recently enacted SAFETEA-LU omnibus transportation funding legislation is regarded as important to the success of this proposal).
As for the RSC plan, its key element, as outlined by Reistrup, would be a new operating company, Amtrak Railroad Operations (ARRO), that would "utilize the existing Amtrak employees and rail fleet with a business model that
I worked in the IC’s Marketing Department just before and during Paul Reistrup’s tenure as Senior VP Marketing and will be first to agree that he is an excellent manager and he has good experience in passenger rail operations.
A West Point graduate, he got in the railroad business after his time in the Army. At the B&O and later at the IC, a big part of his assignment was to rationalize the passenger services of those railroads to the declining market for those services. I am not sure of the timing, but after heading the IC’s Passenger Department, he was given the assignment to start-up and run the IC’s Intermodal Department.
I believe Reistrup went to Amtrak in 1974. At that time not much had changed from the start up day. Amtrak was still using the equipment acquired from the individual railroads and the trains were staffed by the “freight” railroads under what amounted to operating contracts. I’ll stand corrected on this, but I think the equipment service and maintenance was also provided by the railroads. One of Reistrup’s big accomplishments was getting through the process and acquiring the F40 locomotives.
I don’t know the date that Reistrup resigned from Amtrak, but I think he was there at least past the date that Amtrak acquired the NEC under the 4-R Act of 1976. (The enabling legislation for the formation of Conrail.) I don’t know if he agreed with the acquisition of the NEC tracks, but I am sure he had an opinion on the subject.
Prior to the acquisition of the NEC, every Amtrak train was operated on tracks owned by somebody else. However to say that the Washington-New York route was different was a gross understatement. When every other Amtrak route had perhaps no more than two trains a day the NEC had hourly or more frequent service. The establishment of the NEC as Amtrak’s vertically integrated operation certainly did set it apart from the rest of the Amtrak operation.
Gunn has consistently argued against the splitting of t