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In an interview, Alex Kummant says now is the time for a national dialogue on passenger rail

Don’t look for Amtrak’s eighth president and chief executive officer to apologize for the carrier’s federal capital and operating grants of the past. No, he wants more!

“We should ask for big things — we shouldn’t haltingly ask for small things,” Alex Kummant told Sen. Dick Durbin and more than 25 Illinois mayors that the Illinois Democrat and Rep. Tim Johnson (R., Ill) convened at the multi-modal transportation center in Champaign, Ill., on Oct. 17.

“One of the reasons I took this job is that if you look at gas prices, highway congestion, and the challenges in air travel, the time really is now to have a national dialogue on passenger rail. What’s going on here today is the face of [Amtrak’s] future: sitting down with groups of state departments of transportation and freight railroads to look for public monies perhaps totaling in the billions in certain demonstration lanes of 300 to 600 miles in length.”

Kummant’s orientation to corridors — especially the Northeast Corridor — was evident in an interview with TRAINS aboard an inaugural special promoting four new Illinois-backed round trips out of Chicago [see page 30]. Careful to pepper his comments with “in my view” throughout the discussion, Kummant agreed with dismissed predecessor David Gunn when he rejected suggestions that the Corridor’s operations and infrastructure should be separated.

“You ride the head end and see all that catenary coming toward you, that’s one thing. Then imagine maintaining it. What you don’t see are the guys behind the power management desks monitoring how we interact with the electric utilities. The notion that you’re just going to peel that all away — is it possible? There are tremendous operational hurdles — and that doesn’t even begin to address the safety issues. I think to go for some sort of a “big bang’ structural shift today is unlikely to be successful. We’re on a pretty good trajectory for the last three or four years [implementing] state of good repair [initiatives].”

While Kummant knows rolling-stock needs have not been addressed, he chided critics who complain about a “deeply indebted Amtrak” when about 85 percent of the company’s $3.5 billion debt is in long-term leases and about $1 billion of that is in contracts “where the money has been put away and is earning interest.”

“We need an equipment strategy, no question about it. I’m no Wall Street wizard, but it seems to me you could create a separate structure, independent or an Amtrak subsidiary, which is basically an equipment leasing company. Obviously this would take legislation, and I’m under no illusion that this could be done quickly, but you could take these lease portfolios and structure something with loan guarantees to make this an entity that might even attract private capital, like Fannie Mae has, that would provide rolling stock for public transportation, maybe even beyond Amtrak to commuter agencies.”

The new chief executive declined to discuss “specific tactical issues” such as rehabilitating 24 Amfleet I cars for extra capacity, the Sunset Limited, belt-tightening provisions of reauthorization and appropriation proposals still pending in Congress, or the Amtrak board’s desire to have states pick up more of a route’s fully allocated costs tied to ridership increases. He stressed that he had no intention of starting a war over on-time performance with his former employer, the Union Pacific, or other freight railroads.

“While I was there [as a Kansas City-based regional vice president] I worked on the Texas Eagle real hard. I’ve had a lot of good conversations with the UP already, and we will meet again with their dispatching folks and talk through the issues. They are very committed to putting in capital to make slow orders go away — we’ve seen some real improvement in the Coast Starlight over the past month. But in the end, we have to look for some formula where public money can flow into those networks to help both freight and passenger.”

Kummant believes he can play three key roles: build partnerships with the states and freight railroads, push for financial and operating improvement while keeping after “the state-of-good-repair,” and “getting out the good news about what good operators we really are.”

Unlike Gunn, Kummant doesn’t come to the job with preconceptions about what a passenger train should be. Nor did he bring along much personal experience riding Amtrak other than the Ann Rutledge, Hiawathas, and Acela Express. Still, he instinctively waved to track crews as we clattered across UP diamonds at Kinmundy, Ill., and toured Amtrak’s Chicago maintenance base days before reporting for work in Washington.

“One thing I’ve learned [from previous employment experience] is that when you come in from the outside, you really do respect what’s been done in the past. And it certainly does seem that the farther away you get from headquarters, the more you learn.”

At Champaign he said, “A day like this is really energizing to see folks turn out along the way.” People who came to stations at Centralia, Effingham, and Mattoon weren’t the well-heeled business travelers Kummant and the Amtrak board envision when they talk about corridors — just potential riders. They and fellow Amtrak employees are counting on Kummant to keep the trains rolling.

By Bob Johnston, Trains