‘Amtrak Joe’ Biden’s story about conductor appears to derail
AN ANECDOTE in Joe Biden’s speech celebrating the anniversary of Amtrak rail has been called into question after it emerged key details in the story appear to have occurred at different times.
The US president is famed for his love of train journeys and earned the nick- name “Amtrak Joe” during the three decades he spent commuting by rail between Delaware and Washington while serving in the Senate.
To mark Amtrak’s 50th anniversary last week, Mr Biden delivered a heartfelt speech from a Philadelphia station in which he spoke fondly of his longstanding relationship with the train staff on his commute.
In one anecdote, he recalled an Amtrak conductor named Angelo Negri congratulating him on racking up more than 1.5million miles in train journeys over his career.
“There was an article in my fourth or fifth year as vice-president, saying ‘Biden travels 1,300,000 miles on Air Force Two’,” Mr Biden said at the event.
“And I used to – the Secret Service didn’t like it, but I used to like to take the train home. My mom was sick, and I’d try to come home almost every weekend as vice president to see her. And I was getting on the train, and Angelo Negri came up and he goes, ‘Joey, baby’ And he grabbed my cheek, started to squeeze it like he always did.
“He said, ‘Joey, what’s the big deal? 1,200,000-300,000 miles on Air Force Two. You know how many miles you travelled on Amtrak?’ I said, ‘No, Ang, I don’t know’. And he gave me the calculation, and he said, ‘You travelled 1,515,000 miles on Amtrak’. So the fact is, I’d probably take Ang’s word before I took the word of what the article said,” Mr Biden told the event.
However, an online obituary for Mr Negri states that the train conductor retired in 1993, while Mr Biden was still a senator. Mr Biden’s mother, Catherine Finnegan Biden, died in 2010.
A blog post by Mr Biden’s photographer while he was vice-president suggests that he crossed the million-mile mark on Air Force Two in late 2015.
The discrepancies in the anecdote were first reported by Fox News.
A White House official told The Daily Telegraph that there were two events that Mr Biden, 78, held while vice-president that Mr Negri could have attended, despite no longer being a conductor. The first event was a station name dedication. The second was an event to celebrate the Recovery Act in 2009 or 2010.