Comments:
My career in railroading:
In the early days of the railroad industry, anyone who moved and changed jobs every few years was called a “boomer.” I guess I could be called a boomer. I got my BS in Industrial Management from MIT (where I was in ROTC), and my MA in Economics from Yale. I had summer railroad jobs at St. Louis Union Station, then a scruffy depot, now a National Historic Landmark. I served my Army tour with the Joint Chiefs of Staff in the Pentagon during the height of the Vietnam War. After mustering out, I joined the newly created Federal Railroad Administration where I worked on high-speed trains for the Northeast Corridor and on the creation of Amtrak. After six years at FRA, I spent three years at the World Bank working on railroad projects in Turkey, Tunisia, Algeria, Spain, and Portugal.
In 1977, the Carter Administration asked me back to FRA as a political appointee where I served, in succession, as head of the policy office (where we worked on deregulation of the freight railroad industry), General Manager of the Alaska Railroad (where we initiated its sale to the State of Alaska), and head of R&D. My wife Marty and I got married just before moving to Alaska, where we had an 8-month honeymoon and she got her introduction to railroading. When Reagan became president, it was suggested that I rejoin the private sector, so we moved to St. Paul, Minnesota, where I joined Burlington Northern Railroad as director of R&D. After four years there, the company moved us to Kansas City, where we spent eight more years. At BN, our significant R&D projects were natural gas locomotives and satellite-and-data-communications-based positive train control systems. In 1993, instead of moving to Fort Worth with BN, we moved to Boise, Idaho, where I was vice president of marketing for the locomotive division of Morrison Knudsen Corporation. Following MK’s financial collapse in 1995, we moved back to the Washington, DC area where I rejoined the FRA in my old job as director of R&D.
My big career change came in 2003 when FRA detailed me to the Industrial College of the Armed Forces (one of the senior military schools) as the Department of Transportation Faculty Chair. I taught economics and transportation courses and took my students to Europe each spring. Following my retirement from the government in 2007, I continued in academia for eight years as an adjunct professor with Michigan State University’s Railway Management Program and as an adjunct lecturer with HEC Business School – Paris at its International Railway Strategic Management Institute.
It is worth noting that only after I retired (or is it because I retired?) did Congress pass laws requiring the implementation of positive train control systems (October 2008) and appropriating funds for high-speed rail projects (February 2009). The railroad industry dragged it feet on PTC for some years, buth they are now getting with the program.
Life was good for Marty and me. She was tolerant and supportive of my railroad career. We were too busy with our kids to have a mid-life crisis. Unfortunately, after a four-year battle with ovarian cancer, she passed away in September 2017.