By Andrew Selden, United Rail Passenger Alliance, Railway Age Magazine; January 4, 2019
Amtrak Senior Executive Vice President Stephen Gardner’s response to Railway Age’s recent coverage of Amtrak encapsulates perfectly why Amtrak is such a rolling financial and commercial disaster. It also shows that Amtrak’s senior leadership is either deep in the well of self-delusion, or possibly intentionally misleading its various stakeholders.
Gardner makes several assertions of a carefully selected subset of data points that support his thesis that all is well at Amtrak. These assertions, characteristic of recent Amtrak propaganda, omit more than they state, but even what they state is either false or misleading. These examples illustrate the problem: