This Week at Amtrak 2006-12-12
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Volume 3 Number 49
- Last week, here at This Week, we noted for the previous week how Amtrak Chicago boss Don Saunders and his many employees appeared to have “gotten the drop” on Old Man Winter, as he blew into the Midwest during a late fall visit.We noted that in years past, Amtrak in Chicago has struggled, often without success, against the cruelties of harsh winter weather. It has often appeared that like clockwork, Amtrak in Chicago has been caught totally unaware that winter was coming, and preparations should have be made for the convenience of passengers and personnel.It can be said with some surety Mr. Saunders and his Chicago operations employees did what they were supposed to do to be prepared for the storm. It’s too bad the folks at Amtrak’s National Operations Center in Wilmington, Delaware didn’t do as well as Mr. Saunders to keep things going for the benefit of Amtrak’s passengers and crews who were battling the elements. Mr. Saunders got the trains out of the terminals and on the road. It’s what happened then that things went far awry.
- With the kind permission of The State Journal-Register newspaper of Springfield, Illinois, which has been a leader in Illinois covering Amtrak issues, we reprint two news reports of Friday, December 8, 2006.
Ordeal on the tracks When storm hit, hundreds rued choosing Amtrak
By PETE SHERMAN STAFF WRITER Published Friday, December 08, 2006
Friday afternoon at Chicago’s Union Station, Jason Moulton bought his train ticket home to Springfield.
He had come a long way – from Milan, Italy. Moulton, 26, had been working in France the past six months learning the wine trade. He was looking forward to a relaxing trip home. Amtrak seemed like a good way to finish the journey.
At the ticket counter, an Amtrak clerk informed Moulton that his train to Springfield, set to leave at 5 p.m., would make its final stop in Lincoln. From there, passengers would take buses to their destinations, ranging from Springfield to St. Louis.
Fine, Moulton thought. He knew the weather was bad and figured there’d be adjustments.
Roughly 15 minutes before boarding time, however, plans changed again. An announcement was made that the train would, after all, make its way to Springfield.
At that point, he had a feeling that “a lot of weird things are going on with Amtrak today.”
What Moulton did not know – along with, apparently, every Amtrak official in Chicago – was that the three trains already headed south from Union Station were struggling. Ice-covered tree limbs and power lines had fallen over tracks in central Illinois. Electric switches weren’t working. Conductors were stopping the trains so crews could get out and manually switch tracks and remove debris.
None of those trains made it past Lincoln, where Amtrak failed to provide enough buses for everyone.
But that was only one incident among many that eventually made a bad situation an ordeal for hundreds of passengers in the four trains headed south from Chicago.
For the first half of the trip, Moulton’s train kept a modest, steady pace. But starting at Bloomington, it slowed to a crawl.
Between 8:30 and 9 p.m., Moulton said, the conductor announced a “90 percent” chance the train would stop in Lincoln, as Moulton originally was told.
Moulton and the other passengers also learned the three trains ahead of them were stuck near Lincoln.
Brian and Kate Flanagan of Evanston were on the first train, which had left Chicago at 7 a.m. – more than half a day earlier. With their two children, Brian, 20 months, and Mary Kate, one month, the Flanagans were on their way to a wedding in St. Louis.
About the same time Moulton and his fellow passengers were re-informed they would be stopping in Lincoln, the Flanagan family and fellow passengers on the first train had been stuck on the other side of town for hours.
“We had moved from a cornfield south of Lincoln, where we had been for seven, eight hours,” Brian Flanagan said by phone Thursday. “We rolled back to Lincoln. We sat there for – time blurs – hours.”
Out his window, Flanagan could see the buses waiting. He and his wife also were running out of baby formula for Mary Kate. Many passengers wanted to get off the train, but Amtrak employees wouldn’t let them.
“I had had it by that point,” Flanagan said. “We were 14 hours into it. I lost my patience.”
But when Flanagan approached an Amtrak employee, demanding information, “I was told they weren’t on duty anymore,” he said.
“Quite frankly, that wasn’t the answer I was looking for.”
Federal law apparently prohibits Amtrak employees from working longer than 12-hour shifts unless OK’d by superiors. Having passed that mark, and with no orders to keep working, several train employees called it quits.
On Moulton’s train, the delayed passengers also were growing more frustrated.
It didn’t help when, at one stopping point, the conductor came into Moulton’s car and began shouting at a woman sitting next to him, accusing her of dialing 911 to complain, he said.
According to Logan County Emergency Management Agency officials, at least two passengers traveling in the four trains did call 911. But this woman wasn’t one of them, Moulton said.
“The conductor began screaming at this woman – ‘Why did you call 911?’” Moulton said. “It bothered a lot of us who knew she never made the phone call. She had a right to call 911, anyway.”
Things got worse.
As Moulton’s train attempted to pull closer to the Lincoln station, it stalled. Then the power went out. And, along with it, the heat.
“It was for a good 45 minutes to an hour,” Moulton said. “It started getting cold.”
Moulton said the passengers could see it wasn’t a long walk to the station, where buses were waiting.
“Then the conductor made a point of announcing that anyone leaving the train will be arrested,” Moulton said. The conductor even enlisted the snack car cashier to report passengers going AWOL.
When that employee left her station, “mob mentality set in,” Moulton said.
“The passengers started raiding the snack car. It was getting a little bit out of hand. We were hungry and thirsty. People took it upon themselves to go for the bottled water, at least.”
About 9 p.m., Flanagan, desperate to get baby formula for Mary Kate, dialed 911 on his cell phone. Another passenger, calling about someone needing insulin, also dialed 911.
Both calls made their way to Dan Fulscher, director of the Logan County EMA.
“People were on the train for 15 hours,” Fulscher recalled Wednesday. “They needed help. I go, ‘OK.’”
One of the first things Fulscher did was dial Amtrak’s emergency hotline.
“I was put on hold twice, then disconnected. On the third call, in an elevated voice, I let them know who I am. That I need to talk to who’s in charge. They put me with some guy from Philadelphia. He confirms three trains are stopped somewhere in central Illinois.”
Fulscher also called the Illinois Emergency Management Agency’s operation center in Springfield.
“(Springfield) was astonished they had not been made aware that passengers in trains were stranded in the storm,” he said.
The Amtrak official told Fulscher that, of the three stuck trains, only one was near Lincoln.
Of course, there were four trains. All at Lincoln.
Approaching 10 p.m., Fulscher and his Logan County crew made their way to the Lincoln depot to help passengers from the first train, the one that had left Chicago at 7 a.m.
At roughly the same time, local law enforcement got on Moulton’s train and began arguing with the conductor.
They wanted her name. She wanted theirs. The officers asked the conductor what authority she had to arrest anyone who wanted to leave. The conductor said she was following Amtrak policy, that it was illegal.
Then the officers accused the conductor of kidnapping the passengers.
“At that point, the conductor ‘wakes up,’ ” said Moulton, who tried to record the confrontation with his video camera. “At the same time this is happening, family members are coming up to our train and screaming for their relatives. ‘That’s my daughter! Get her off this train now!’”
“Then people start jumping off the train.”
Attempts to reach the conductor through Amtrak were unsuccessful.
Moulton decided to remain on the train. Eventually, the power returned and the train gradually made it to a crossing near the depot.
Fulscher’s Logan County emergency fleet still believed he and his team were arriving to help passengers from just one train.
“I see people coming off the train, believing this is all there is,” he said. Then he saw others appearing from the darkness behind the first train, some having walked with their luggage for blocks.
“I look at some Amtrak employees and say, ‘I thought your people said one train,’” Fulscher recalled.
“No, there’s four,” they told him.
The conductor from Moulton’s train met with Fulscher and demanded he help her establish a head count.
“That’s something you should be telling me,” Fulscher shot back.
What he said next differs slightly based on various accounts. But all versions agree in basic form.
“You’re in Logan County now,” Fulscher said, in more words or less. “And we’re taking charge of these passengers.”
The buses that were supposed to be waiting for Moulton and the other passengers on his train had left by the time they made their way to the boarding area.
“We’re not only stuck there. We had no place to go,” Moulton said.
Then, he spotted the emergency management team.
“Maybe 10 vehicles, an ambulance, a pickup, Ford Broncos,” Moulton said. “Lincoln had banded together to transport us in our moment of need.”
Fulscher and his crew gathered the remaining dozens of passengers from Moulton’s train and took them to the county’s emergency safety complex in Lincoln. Downstairs, he let them know he’d do his best to get them home. Moulton video-recorded Fulscher’s speech. On Moulton’s tape, you can hear a man off camera calling Fulscher, “Santa Claus.”
“Mainly they wanted to hear someone tell them what’s going on,” Fulscher said.
About 3 a.m., as his team worked on finding transportation, Fulscher woke up the owner of a local pizzeria, who quickly baked up a dozen or so pizzas. Fulscher woke up a local school bus driver and commandeered a nursing home shuttle bus.
Eventually, he got enough vehicles lined up to get people on the road again, providing a police escort just in case. When the passengers arrived in Springfield, the emergency crews helped scrape ice off the cars the passengers had parked there days before.
Approaching 6 a.m., Moulton finally arrived in Springfield. Another passenger offered him a ride. It took them 45 minutes to scrape all the ice off the car. Moulton didn’t get to bed until 7:30 a.m. – 2:30 p.m. in Milan.
“I’m astonished between the difference in European trains and Amtrak,” Moulton said. “I haven’t taken Amtrak in years. This is most likely my last time.”
Flanagan and his family had arrived in Springfield hours earlier, but they were too late to make the wedding. They stayed overnight in a hotel and rented a car to drive to St. Louis on Saturday. They at least made a post-wedding party.
Like Moulton, Flanagan said his regard for Amtrak isn’t high.
“To some degree, I have an ax to grind over Amtrak,” he said. “If they look bad, I’m not concerned.”
Pete Sherman can be reached at 788-1539 or pete.sherman@sj-r.com.
All Content © The State Journal-Register [Mr. Sherman's follow-up article, the same day.]
Amtrak responds
By PETE SHERMAN STAFF WRITER Published Friday, December 08, 2006
Amtrak officials say they’re trying to figure out what caused a massive breakdown in communication during the snow and ice storm that stranded four trains with hundreds of passengers for roughly 14 hours near Lincoln last Friday.
Passengers were uninformed about the delays, and some were told they’d be arrested if they tried to leave the train once it had stalled. After 12 hours in the train, some staff claimed they were off duty and couldn’t help. At least two passengers dialed 911 from inside their train cars.
At one point, a set of passengers, noticing their snack car had been abandoned, began to raid it.
By the time all the passengers had disembarked at Lincoln, dozens were left stranded because Amtrak provided too few buses to finish the trek. Eventually, a squad from Logan County’s Emergency Management Agency took away Amtrak’s control of passengers.
“We want to make it clear to passengers that we’re greatly concerned about what they experienced that night,” said Amtrak spokesman Marc Magliari. “We’re planning a series of debriefings to come up with lessons learned from this experience.”
“We also very much appreciate Logan County emergency services and law enforcement,” he said. “It was not a situation we could have anticipated.”
Amtrak employees are trained to follow specific safety policies, Magliari said.
“We don’t want people getting off of a train when it’s not safe to,” he said. “It’s a pretty big step from some of these cars to the ground, especially in a snowstorm. Some of these tracks are near steep embankments. It’s not a safe place to get off.”
Still, Magliari acknowledges that Amtrak has much to improve upon.
“We need to improve communication. We do want to know which employees preformed well and which ones didn’t,” he said.
Magliari said there also are plans to assess Amtrak’s training for emergencies.
“Later this month, we’ll be meeting with the Illinois Emergency Management Agency and the Illinois Department of Transportation to find out better what the communication and sheltering resources are, should something like this occur again,” he said.
Anyone with concerns about Amtrak service, in general or on Friday in particular, can call its public relations office at (800) 872-7245, or (800) USA-RAIL. The automated operator can be bypassed simply by saying “agent.”
Pete Sherman can be reached at 788-1539 or pete.sherman@sj-r.com.
All Content © The State Journal-Register
- The above is pretty awful stuff. Three Amtrak presidents ago (It’s hard to keep track of all of them), in the 1990s, Amtrak’s long and short distance trains were broken up into business groups, versus today’s divisions. The change to divisions was “supposed” to make Amtrak more like a railroad, but that line of reasoning escapes everyone who knows anything about passenger service or basic customer service.Under today’s system of divisions, managers of each division are responsible for all Amtrak trains in their territory. They are responsible for only those trains in their territory. Once the train enters another division, their responsibility for that train disappears. CNOC (Amtrak’s central national ops center in Wilmington, Delaware) is supposed to be the central coordinating authority for all trains, crews, and passenger needs. They are the ones who are supposed to contract for busses, handle emergency situations, and make sure things go smoothly. If something happens on the Northeast Corridor where CNOC is located, the problem is often solved quickly. If something happens in what CNOC considers bow and arrow country, which is defined as west of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, and south of Washington, D.C., Amtrak crews are often left up to their own devices to solve problems beyond the minimal help provided by CNOC.Under the old product line system, there were general managers of each business group, and individual product line directors (managers) who were responsible for a single long distance train (or groups of short distance trains) every minute each train was rolling over the road. The product line directors had service managers at each terminal, plus at critical points along the way who kept constant watch on crews and train progress. When a situation like what above happened, it was up to a product line director, and when necessary, the help of a general manager, to make sure all passengers were taken care of, and problems were resolved.Clearly, two things are evident. One, the current system doesn’t work, based on the number of reports this year in TWA which have highlighted so many service failures by CNOC. Second, somebody needs to go back to “owning” these trains, and be responsible for them all of the time. Today, no one is held accountable for failures. Product line directors and general managers were accountable, and it showed. Personal responsibility is a good thing. Amtrak needs more personal responsibility among its managers.
