DON’T ASK ME, I’M THE BOSS.
Clueless Amtrak CEO rides the ‘duh’ line during Penn Station grilling
Amtrak’s chief basically threw his hands up in defeat while addressing state Assembly members on Thursday — lobbing a bunch of “I don’t knows” as he was grilled over the commuter crisis at Penn Station.
President and CEO Wick Moorman, who’s responsible for the busiest transit hub in the country, admitted he had no clue what to expect from summer repairs that will cause major delays ffor Long Island Rail Road and NJ Transit riders starting July 7.
“I know all of you are anxious tto know what impacts will occur aas a result of this work,” he said, wwhen pressed by Assemblyman Jeffrey Dinowitz for information.
“We don’t yet have the final answers to that question.”
During his testimony before the Standing Committee on Corporations, Authorities and Commissions, Moorman could offer only scant details on how many trains would be affected.
“What is clear is that all services will be impacted for two multiweek outage periods this summer but that significant levels of service will continue to operate in the station,” said Moorman, who added that he hoped to release a schedule with the service disruptions by next week.
After the hearing, reporters asked for a more precise figure on the number of trains that will be delayed amid the renewal project.
“I just don’t really know,” Moorman replied, adding that his
“best estimate” is that “75 percent of the trains will run.”
Dinowitz (D-Bronx) noted that work won’t be done on the Fourth of July or Labor Day weekends, when more riders are on Amtrak than on LIRR and NJ Transit.
“We don’t know that we could assemble a work crew,” Moorman replied.
The Amtrak chief also dropped a bombshell, revealing that the summer repairs likely won’t be enough — and that more work will need to be done next year at the station, which serves 60,000 passengers and 1,300 trains daily.
“We just don’t know yet,” he said. “Our plan is to get as much work as we can get done this year.”
“It’s at the point where the likelihood of some kind of disruptions is increasing,” he added.
It has been one headache after another at Penn Station in recent months, with two derailments in the last six weeks alone.
One of the incidents led to a week of hellish delays, disrupting the commutes of hundreds of thousands of riders as Amtrak struggled to make repairs.
Wednesday night, signal problems in an East River tunnel caused several LIRR trains to be canceled and delayed just before the start of rush hour.
Asked what Wednesday’s issue was, Moorman said he wasn’t sure.
“We are still doing the investigation of that. It involved an LIRR train and some kind of dispatcher-routing issue ,” he said .“The dispatcher was an Amtrak dispatcher, but we’re not yet quite sure of the sequence of events. I really just can’t say anything about that.”
Still, Moorman, who took over last September. testified Thursday that he believes Amtrak is doing an admirable job of operating Penn Station, and blamed many of its problems on the number of trains and riders.
“As someone new to the company and with plenty of railroad experience, I have been very impressed that Amtrak has been able to hold together this incredibly complex, busy and fragile infrastructure as well as it has, in spite of many impediments,” he said.
“This is the busiest train station in North America, and it’s operat- ing at twice its designed capacity,” Moorman added.
“I have looked at the numbers of Amtrak-caused disruptions over the last five years, and they are remarkably low, particularly considering the age of the infrastructure.”
But Moorman conceded that Amtrak needs help from the private sector in managing the Penn Station concourse.
“We need to find a way to address it on a unified basis and bring in the people out there who know how to coordinate,” he said.
Riders are fed up with the chaos — and with Moorman
“It’s a lack of accountability,” said Matt Tores, of Long Island. “He’s deflecting blame for a job that should have been done long ago.”