Amtrak announced last week that its current chief executive officer, William Flynn, will retire in January and be replaced by Stephen Gardner. Gardner thus will become the company’s fifth CEO in six years.
Amtrak’s new CEO will oversee the spending of $30 billion to improve the Northeast Corridor and another $30 billion or more to increase service in other parts of the country. Photo by Simon Brugel.
Six years ago, Joseph Boardman had been one of Amtrak’s longest-serving CEOs, having been hired in 2008. But there were reports that he suffered temper tantrums and profanity-laced tirades to subordinates. Many people were happy to see him go when the board of directors replaced him with Charles “Wick” Moorman in late 2016.
Moorman had been CEO of Norfolk Southern, one of the nation’s biggest railroads, and he saw his job with Amtrak as a rescue operation. He brought in several former Norfolk Southern executives to fix problems that had developed under Boardman’s reign. Since he thoroughly understood the rail industry and, having been CEO of a company whose headquarters was close to Washington, was well acquainted with DC politics, Moorman might have been as good a CEO as the legendary Graham Claytor, who had a similar background. However Moorman only wanted to work for Amtrak for a year.
As his replacement, he and the board picked Richard Anderson, who previously had been a rather controversial CEO of Delta Airlines. Some people think that transportation is transportation, but running an airline that operates a fleet of planes with very little supporting infrastructure is very different from running a railroad that depends heavily on a huge amount of infrastructure. Anderson lasted less than three years and was far from the company’s most successful CEO.
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To replace him, the board went even further outside the passenger rail industry by hiring Flynn, whose previous career was in air freight. As Trains magazine’s editor David P. Morgan once said, freight is wholesale while passenger is retail, so understanding one does not mean someone understands the other.
The board must have realized Flynn’s weakness early on, as less than eight months after hiring him they “kicked him upstairs” to still be CEO but no longer president. Instead, they made Gardner, who had previously been Amtrak’s chief operating officer, the president.
How do you be CEO but not chairman of the board or president of an organization? It seems likely that Flynn’s main job was as a liaison to Congress. But Gardner should prove more than adequate for that as, before working for Amtrak, he worked as a Congressional staff member on transportation issues. Gardner has also worked for some class II railroads in the past, but mainly he is a political expert.
It could be argued that a political expert is what Amtrak needs as it prepares to spend a lot of money. While that money is ostensibly supposed to go for transportation improvements, in reality the money is political and the goal of spending it will be to please politicians. That also means a lot of it will be wasted from a transportation viewpoint, which means Gardner may make Democratic politicians happy, but not necessarily Republican ones. If, as seems likely, Republicans take charge of Congress in 2023, Amtrak will probably then have to replace Gardner with someone who actually knows how to run a railroad.
You can only do 4 things
1: cut taxes, cut spending (Which leaves you in the same boat) but it’s what you should do in a recession.
2: Raise taxes, Cut spending (what you should do in a good economy)
3: Cut taxes, Raise spending (What republicans do)
4: Raise taxes, Raise spending (What democrats do)
Hmph. Still no Amtrak, NTSB or FRA report on that September 25th Empire Builder derailment in Montana that killed 3.