Good advice across 126 years went into picking Wick Moorman as Amtrak's new president

Amtrak, for once, was right on time. The passenger carrier today named its replacement for President Joe Boardman, selecting former Norfolk Southern Chairman Wick Moorman to start Sept. 1. Boardman plans to retire at the end of September after serving since November 2008.

A lot of observers had bet on others to lead the company. Moorman is a surprising choice, given that he’d said that he’d promised his family that he wouldn’t take another full-time job after leaving NS earlier this year. I haven’t talked to him since the announcement, but we all know how strong the calling of railroading is, and, much like other pursuits, once you are in it, you are in the business for life. I cannot blame him for jumping back on board, and we should all be grateful to his family for allowing him to return to the throttle.

I’ve long been a fan of Bob and Graham Claytor, the Virginia brothers who led Norfolk & Western, Southern Railway, Norfolk Southern, and Amtrak at various points in their careers. Graham Claytor in my mind will always be the ultimate role model of the feisty Amtrak chief executive, bound and determined to make a success of what he was given, and deeply rooted in good railroading and customer service. I never met David Gunn, but everything I saw, heard, and read about the man was that he was a natural born railroader, cared deeply for his troops, and did everything he could to make things happen. Alex Kummant was in the job barely two years, and the one time I met him at Washington Union Station, he seemed uninterested.

Wick, of course, is deeply interested. He’s a professional railroader going back to 1970, and his love and appreciation for railroading and especially passenger trains is evident in the tuxedo set of Fs that pulls NS’s office car trains today, the heritage units, and the steam excursions he returned to the company. He beamed especially bright the day in September 2011 when Southern Railway 630 pulled the first steam train on NS tracks in 17 years. He’s following Graham Claytor into Amtrak’s top job, and I suspect he will be every bit as much of an activist president as Claytor was.

Good passenger trains are badly needed in this fast growing country where our Interstates are crumbling and our roads and airports are jammed. Money, the kind of capital money that yields good passenger trains, is tight. Politics in the capital city are as polarized as ever. To be successful, is the head of Amtrak in 2016 a politician? Is he or she a railroader? A little of both? The job will be complex and daunting, even for the best CEO.

Earlier this year, friends discussing Amtrak’s next boss included me on an email chain that included a quote from lawyer and diplomat Joseph H. Choate. This is what it said:

“So when you want to get a head for one of these giant railroads, what do you do? You don’t hunt him out among college graduates; you don’t catch a bloated or collapsed financier and make him at once the master of the science of transportation; you do not try to catch a great lawyer or a great orator, only now or then, but you look for a man that entered the service of the company as a rodman and worked his way up through every step of service from the bottom to the top, who learned all of the details of the business, so that he could see how everything was done, when it was done right, who learned all of the secrets of your business and affairs, internal and external, and then after 30 years you make him your President, and you give your absolute trust to him.”

The words were spoken about the mighty Pennsylvania Railroad and the direction of its leadership in 1890. They’re words worth repeating today, and apparently words that Amtrak’s board kept in mind while selecting Wick Moorman to lead the company. Good for them, good for Wick, and good for all of us who love railroading.