This is a partial quote from the Railway Age website today (I added the bold emphasis). The full story, among others, is at
http://www.railwayage.com/breaking_news.shtml
David Gunn: “I did the honorable thing”
When he came out of retirement to accept the position as Amtrak’s President and Chief Executive Officer little more than three years ago, David L. Gunn—a highly respected career railroader with more than 40 years’ experience operating freight trains and running transit systems in the U.S. and Canada—said he didn’t need the job, and if his superiors didn’t like the job he was doing, they could fire him. He’d return to his home in Nova Scotia.
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“The Board members came in this morning and asked me to resign. I refused, so they fired me,” Gunn said in an interview this afternoon with Railway Age Editor William C. Vantuono. “I feel at least that I did the right, honorable thing. I wasn’t going to abandon our people.” He said that the Bush Administration’s people wanted to implement their plan, “which is destroying Amtrak.” “I stood in their way,” he said. “That’s why they fired me.”
Gunn, a veteran of the Santa Fe and Illinois Central railroads who made his mark in transportation by turning around transit systems in Boston, New York City, Washington D.C., and Toronto, spent the past three-plus years streamlining Amtrak’s management structure, improving financial controls, and implementing many state-of-good-repair programs on plant and equipment. “If you want an example of getting fired for producing good numbers, this is it,” he said. “It’s an upside-down world we live in.”
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“Anything they’ll tell you is bulls_t,” Gunn told Railway Age in his characteristically frank, shoot-from-the hip manner. Citing the 93-6 vote in the Senate approving an Amtrak reathorization bill earmarking nearly $12 billion in mostly capital investment over the next few years, Gunn said “it doesn’t compute. The Administration is serious about taking this place apart.”
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Sen. Trent Lott (R-Miss.), who with Sen. Frank Lautenberg cosponsored the successful Amtrak reathorization bill, called the Amtrak Board’s action “a step backward.”
“The manner in which Mineta has handled this is disgraceful,” said another industry observer. He described the Secretary as “widely regarded in the railway industry as little more than a Bush Administration puppet.” Mineta’s pronouncements on Amtrak, particularly, the FRA awarding grants to Amtrak only if it “demonstrates that it has reformed its acquisitions practices,” have sounded like “the petulant parent who threatens to punish a misbehaving child by cutting off his allowance.”
David Laney was previously on record as opposing Administration plans to break up Amtrak. He “is now seen as a part of that effort,” said the National Corridors Initiative. “Many people believe that the Administration will attempt to sell off the Northeast Corridor to a consortium of private interests. Administration officials are reportedly in the process of meeting with the private-sector organizations involved.”
NCI’s analysis may not be wholly accurate. Other sources have told Railway Age that a more likely scenario would involve retaining federal ownership of the NEC but placing operations under the auspices of a public/private partnership that would include a federal/multi-state consortium. That model, Gunn maintains, won’t work, given a railroad’s unique (compared to other transportation modes) need for fully integrated operations and infrastructure.
What happens next? “The Administration is running out of time,” Gunn told Railway Age. “They have to do a lot of the dirty stuff this year, because next year is an election year, and what they’ve got in mind will be very unpopular.” Gunn predicted that, within the next few months, “there will be a lot of train-offs and other service cutbacks.”
