Amtrak’s training wheels

Amtrak President Wick Moorman, rightly admitting that his railroad was to blame for two different derailments that multiplied chaos for hundreds of thousands of NJ Transit and LIRR commuters, comically claims that Amtrak “has done a good job of managing Penn Station.”

Amtrak, Penn’s deadbeat landlord, has done a horrible job running the snake pit. Just ask the unhappy tenants, NJ Transit and LIRR.

Still, there could be a little light at the end of riders’ terrible tunnel. In announcing plans for the rail hub, which include disruptive track closings for repairs this summer, Moorman added he’s bringing on Tom Prendergast, the just-retired MTA chairman.

Good — except the Amtrak chief asked Prendergast to focus only on a tiny piece of Penn’s many problems: the “interaction, coordination and collaboration between the railroads’ various passenger concourses within Penn Station.”

That’s not nothing: We have a ready list of crazy inefficiencies at the station, from confounding signage to discombobulated police forces to separate cleaning crews.

But in the hell that is Penn, where Joes and Janes trying to get to work and back home again are tormented seemingly every day, Prendergast’s charge has got to be bigger than that.

Moorman has spent his entire career, from college intern to CEO and board chairman, at Norfolk Southern, a freight line. He never had a passenger until he showed up at Amtrak in September.

Prendergast has 40 years’ experience moving people: atop the LIRR, the city Transit Authority and then the whole MTA. Which means rush hour and peak times and the intricate ballet of Penn of moving trains in and out and people on and off and up and down are his native language.

More to the point, he knows how to rehab aging infrastructure without shafting passengers.

That was the logic behind Prendergast pioneering the subway’s FASTRACK program — which sped repairs by closing lines overnight and weekends to deploy round-the-clock crews. And shuttering the Sandy-damaged R train tunnel to minimize service interruptions.

Larger point: The subway runs 8,000 trains a day; people on them make 6 million trips. Amtrak has 300 trains and under 100,000 passengers daily nationwide. Even at Penn, its busiest stop, it’s the small fry, accounting for just 8% of the daily head count. The dominant LIRR handles 53% of Penn’s load (about 230,000 trips) and NJ Transit 39%.

Yet underfunded, underprepared Amtrak is in charge. Its less-crowded trains get priority. Its dispatchers assign the tracks. Its cops secure the place (or try to). Why?

Gov. Cuomo says he wants the MTA to take command. That should happen, relegating Amtrak to a junior partner. Until then, Prendergast will have to do.