Amtrak plan a rail flop
It’s a train wreck. Amtrak shelled out tens of millions of dollars on a bungled scheme to relocate hundreds of workers to a building it bought for $41 million in President Biden’s hometown of Wilmington, Del., the rail company’s official watchdog said in a report Friday.
The plan, billed in 2018 as the railroad’s Unified Operations Center (UOC), would have relocated hundreds of employees from across the country to a single downtown office building bought by the company in 2020.
Some 250 train dispatchers from Washington, New York, Chicago and Boston, as well as Amtrak Police officers, IT personnel and social media staffers, were all supposed to make the building their home office, the report from Amtrak’s inspector general states.
Amtrak projected savings of up to $50 million that would have otherwise gone to leasing office space.
But the plan veered off track almost immediately, according to the report.
Dispatchers from Chicago, New York and Boston work hand-in-hand with local transportation authorities — including the Long Island Rail Road — and weren’t able to relocate to Wilmington because of those partnerships.