bostontrainguy wrote: ↑Tue Mar 03, 2020 9:38 am
For what it's worth:
Flynn comes from a railroading family. His father was a Conrail engineer; his uncle, an Amtrak engineer; and his brother, an Amtrak conductor and local union chair.
From Railway Age
Interesting...and certainly gives me hope for the future of Amtrak. I would hope that Flynn's brother (if still in active service) can help to provide a boots-on-the-ground view of the operations to help reshape how Amtrak functions for the future. Or at least, that's how I would do it.
There's a reason why my current employers have an Operations Reference Database (ORDb for short) that is maintained on the station-level. The best people to ask about operational challenges and capabilities
are the people who are actually there. This allows decisions regarding scheduling and diversions to be made without accidentally screwing over a field station or sending an aircraft to a station that can't handle it. Additionally, all of the partner regional carriers have access to it.
Consulting the engineers, conductors, trainmasters, and RFEs to help reform the safety culture as well as changing operations would probably be a wise decision.