What I think is a key sentence in his letter to his employees:
"It is not an exaggeration to say I have followed Amtrak since Day One – and while my background is in freight, I have a deep appreciation for passenger rail and have ridden passenger trains all my life. "
Mr. Moorman definitely belongs in whatever sequel comes for The Men Who Loved Trains. With that said, what is he really doing at Amtrak?
Keeping the seat warm for Mr. Biden.
I doubt it. When Joe Biden’s term as VP ends I think that’ll be the end of his political career. Losing a son to cancer took a lot out of the poor man, parents aren’t supposed to bury their children, it’s not supposed to work that way.
I could be wrong.
While it isn’t supposed to happen it does. A man is judged, not by how many times life deals unfair blows, but how he absorbs the blows and grows above them.
Were the Amtrak board solely looking for a warm presence to bridge to Amtrak Joe they wouldn’t have tapped the highly regarded retired head of a Fortune 500 corporation. It might ruin their already questionable reputation.
Why not? Maybe Wick just wanted to run Amtrak for a year or so for the hell of it and isn’t looking for a long-term gig.
In 1970, Moorman was hired by Southern Railway near Georgia Tech campus, and back home in Hattiesburg his father was the Dean of the University of Southern Mississippi.
https://archive.org/stream/southerner341970univ#page/38/mode/2up
Perhaps but I rather doubt it. As he quoted his wife speaking to GT, “I married you for better or for worse but not for lunch.” She knows he needs something to do. Even so, with all that has happened legislatively regarding NRPC over the past decade, what is he really doing there?
Guess we’ll find out.
The Virginian-Pilot, July 12, 1998
Conrail Takeover Complicates Computer Issues for Railroad
“From a distance it looks like a rhinoceros out on the veldt,” said [Wick] Moorman, vice president of information technology for the Norfolk-based railroad. “The rhinoceros is the information technology system itself and all your software. It’s a great big issue, but it’s also relatively easy to fix.”
But even if it fixes its own rhino and swats all the flies, Norfolk Southern might not be out of the woods. With the Conrail takeover, its rail network will grow by half to serve nearly every major market east of the Mississippi River.
Norfolk Southern began its Year 2000 remediation program in 1995 and has spent more than $10 million reprogramming software and its mainframe computers. Moorman’s staff combed about 18,000 programs and 20 million lines of code, and the systems still need to be tested. That’s Moorman’s rhino.
The Virginian-Pilot, May 17, 1999
Railroad Used Low-Technology Methods, Too