Chairman Laney’s comments last week

NARP has received many questions about Amtrak Chairman David Laney’s remarks about route restructuring both during last week’s Senate Appropriations hearing, and similar comments right after the hearing to reporters, with whom he also discussed the search for Amtrak’s next CEO.

A Reuters story by John Crawley began: “Amtrak, under pressure to cut costs and reform its business practices, will reevaluate its 15 long-distance trains this year and could restructure that service, the railroad’s board chairman said on Thursday.” Crawley also wrote: “Laney said the railroad has a ‘mixed bag’ of prospects for its presidency, including ‘a number of potential candidates from the air industry.’ He did not identify any aviation executives but said they may be appropriate due to challenges faced by airlines to restructure their operations…‘We’ve got to take the entire long distance route structure and our trains on each of these routes and put them on the table and scrub them, and decide whether they make sense from an operating standpoint - whether they are as relevant as they were 20 or 30 or 40 or 50 years ago,’ Laney said.”

An AP story by Donna de la Cruz had this: “Amtrak’s chairman on Thursday said the railroad will scrutinize all of its long-distance routes this year for efficiency and could scrap, reconfigure or add lines as it tries to prove to Congress and the Bush administration that the rail system is reforming itself. ‘There’s nothing, as far as I’m concerned, that’s off the table,’ David Laney told reporters…[Long-distance trains] provide the only rail passenger service to 23 states, according to Amtrak statistics.  Laney said Amtrak will study every route and decide on how efficient they are. ‘What we’re trying to do is make it succeed, not take it apart,’ he said. David Laney also told reporters…the board probably will not name a new Amtrak president before mid-May but could consider someone from the airline industry to replace David Gunn.”

David Laney deserves credit for two key decisions, starting with the pick of David Hughes (an early Gunn hire) for Acting CEO. I’d be happy if he got the job full-time: he’s an experienced railroader. In the current political climate, the fact that his entire pre-Amtrak career was in the private sector should be a plus.

Second, Amtrak’s grant request of $1.598 billion plus clear designated uses for an additional $275 million is a sound “ask”. It prompted Senator Murray (D-WA) to observe that the board’s Bush appointees must know something the “ideologues” don’t about the real costs of running a national passenger service.

Possibly, both in terms of CEO selection and route studies, Laney is laying the groundwork to better defend (to the administration) subsequent decisions we might like and the administration might dislike. Obviously, decisions known to be the product of careful study are easier to defend.

On the other hand, the concerns we’ve heard about these comments could be well founded. Or the truth might lie somewhere in the middle—Laney himself is not from the railroad industry, is relatively new to the Amtrak business and may genuinely be awaiting the outcome of a route study before he decides what to do.

In any event, we will be watching closely, and continuing to work to defend the entire system.