Amtrak said on Monday that one of its vice presidents will become its president on Dec. 1.
Stephen Gardner, currently Amtrak’s executive vice president and chief operating and commercial officer, will replace William Flynn.
Flynn, who became Amtrak’s president and CEO in April, will remain with the passenger carrier as CEO and a member of its board of directors.
The promotion of Gardner to president had been widely expected by many rail industry observers.
Railway Age reported that Gardner has been making most of the major decisions and setting policy during his time as an Amtrak senior vice president.
His elevation to the president’s chair coincides with the election of Joseph Biden as president. Gardner, like Biden, is a Democrat.
Earlier in his career, Gardner served in staff positions for Congressional Democrats on Capitol Hill, including Delaware Senator Tom Carper.
He joined Amtrak in 2009 after having helped develop railroad and transportation policy for the U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation.
Before coming to Washington, Gardner worked for Guilford Rail System (now Pan Am Railways) and the Buckingham Branch Railroad.
Railway Age said Gardner is widely recognized as one of the principal authors of the Passenger Rail Investment and Improvement Act of 2008.
The magazine said Gardner was unlikely to become Amtrak’s president so long as Republicans controlled the White House and the Department of Transportation.
In a prepared statement, Amtrak said the change in leadership was “part of a broader set of actions taken . . . to ensure that Amtrak is well positioned for success in fiscal year 2021 and beyond.”
The statement said Gardner will lead day-to-day operations and oversee marketing, operations, planning, government affairs, and corporate communication.
Historically, Amtrak’s president has been its top executive, but during the tenure of the late Joseph Boardman the company added the CEO title to his duties.
Amtrak’s statement said the carrier faces “two urgent challenges in 2021” including weathering the COVID-19 pandemic and bolstering Amtrak’s future.
Amtrak’s presidency has been a revolving door in recent years with no one person holding the position for more than a few years.
Charles “Wick” Moorman, a former CEO of Norfolk Southern, came out of retirement in 2016 to serve as Amtrak president and CEO in what at the time was described as a transitional appointment.
Moorman became co-CEO of Amtrak with Richard Anderson in June 2017, an arrangement that continued through the end of 2017.
Anderson, a former CEO of Delta Air Lines, served as Amtrak’s top executive until being replaced in April 2020 by William Flynn, a former CEO of Atlas Air.
Musing Aboard Boardman’s Legacy
March 18, 2019In my world Joseph Boardman was just another name and visage I knew only from a printed page or megapixels on a computer screen.
Following his death on March 7 several transportation industry leaders issued warm statements about the life and career of Amtrak’s ninth president who died at age 70 after suffering a stroke while vacationing with his family in Florida.
The tributes were the predictable things that people say when a high-profile person passes away.
There’s nothing wrong with that. They are paying homage and not writing a biography with detail, context and nuance.
Some tributes described Boardman as a friend of long-distance passenger trains.
He gladdened the hearts of passenger train advocates by attacking the efforts of the current Amtrak administration to replace the middle of the route of the Southwest Chief with a bus bridge.
Boardman was a persistent critic of current Amtrak management, which was enough to make him a hero in the eyes of some.
Of the many tributes paid to Boardman, two have particularly stood out to me because they hint at a cautionary tale for those wanting to see Amtrak expand its network.
A friend of mine in announcing Boardman’s death during a local railroad club meeting said he didn’t agree with all of Boardman’s policy decisions as president of Amtrak, but understood the pressures and realities he had to deal with and how those shaped his behavior.
Jim Wrinn, the editor of Trains, sounded a similar theme in his tribute posted on the magazine’s website.
Acknowledging he didn’t know Boardman well, Wrinn recalled a comment Boardman made at a 2010 conference in Chicago.
In responding to the many questions posed of him about when this or that was going happen at Amtrak, Boardman often replied, “Not in a time frame that you and I would find acceptable.”
In an interview with a Trains reporter last September, Boardman said he had been unable to persuade the Amtrak board of directors to find and spend more money on the carrier’s national network.
So such things as daily operation of the Cardinal and Sunset Limited were not accomplished on Boardman’s watch.
There are two ways to look at that.
One view suggests Boardman lacked the communications skills necessary to persuade those board members to adopt his point of view.
Could a more skilled communicator have succeeded where Boardman failed?
Maybe not and that raises the second way to look at Boardman’s comment about being unable to persuade the board.
There are powerful institutional forces surrounding Amtrak that for the most part made Boardman little more than a keeper of the status quo.
These forces stymie the type of expansion that passenger advocates crave and ultimately will hamstring the vision of the current Amtrak management to restructure the passenger carrier into a series of corridor services and a few experiential long-distance trains.
Boardman’s defense of the Southwest Chief could have been motivated by a desire to preserve what he viewed as one of his crowning achievements. Maybe he did believe in the long-distance passenger train.
Yet that network remained frozen in place between 2008 and 2016 when he served as CEO.
We await a comprehensive review of Boardman’s time at Amtrak that will provide an in-depth examination of the successes and shortcomings of his distinguished career.
That includes a review of his interaction with the carrier’s board of directors, Congress, the U.S. Department of Transportation and transportation policy makers at the federal, state and local levels.
That review might find that Boardman was not quite the friend of the long-distance train that some have made him out to be or it might find that no one person no matter how personally dedicated he or she is to long-distant trains would have been able to move the mountain standing in front of having more trains not to mention enhanced services aboard those that exist.
Tags:Amtrak, Amtrak presidents, Commentary on Amtrak, Joseph Boardman
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