Home
»
Trains Magazine
»
Forums
»
Passenger
»
If I were the head of Amtrak what would you do

Edit post

Edit your reply below.

Post Body
Enter your post below.
Fueling from a pool is not always the case for Amtrak.In Fort Worth, for example, the Heartland Flyer and Texas Eagle are fueled by a contractor.  He pulls his truck next to the locomotive and gives it a drink of diesel.  On more than one occasion I have stood on the platform in Fort Worth and watched the operation.  I have observed the driver doing the paper work before and after each load.  It is possible that he is drawing cartoons, but I doubt it.The contractor completes a ticket that probably shows the amount of fuel dispensed, time, date, and other required information.  I would be surprised if he does not note the locomotive number or some other identifying mark.  Otherwise, neither he nor Amtrak have an audit trail for the fuel load.  At the end of the month, if not before hand, he sends an invoice to Amtrak.  It probably requires supporting fuel tickets for each load.  If Amtrak is paying invoices without proper supporting documentation, their external and internal auditors would be all over them.   Paying an invoice for materials and supplies without supporting documentation does not work in this post Enron era.  Accounts payable matches the fuel tickets with the invoice to make sure that Amtrak got what it is paying for and is paying the correct amount.  It then cuts a check to the vendor or wires the money to his bank.Amtrak's locomotives, as far as I have observed in Texas, have fuel gages on the tanks.  It would be relatively easy for someone to spot check the amount of fuel loaded and used and project the samples to a year or whatever period is appropriate.In the case of the re-fueling in Fort Worth, it would be easy to determine within reason how much fuel goes into the locomotives since there are not many of them.  In Chicago, which I presume is the base for the Hiawatha locomotives, tracing the amount of fuel used might be a greater challenge if it is only metered into a pool tank and not metered into each locomotive (a weak control that should draw the attention of the auditors).    If Amtrak does not know how much fuel is pumped into each locomotive or used by it, it could estimate the fuel cost.  Presumably it knows the rated fuel consumption for each class of locomotive under various load conditions.  It knows how many miles a Hiawatha runs each day; calculating an estimated fuel burn and cost would be relatively easy.  Of course, if the fuel comes out of a common pool, it would have to use average inventory cost, as opposed for FIFO or LIFO, to determine the cost of the fuel, but I suspect that it could get a reasonable estimate.  I don't know how precisely Amtrak knows or doesn't know how much fuel is burned on each of its major routes.  I would be shocked if they did not have at least a reasonable estimate for the amount and the cost.
Tags (Optional)
Tags are keywords that get attached to your post. They are used to categorize your submission and make it easier to search for. To add tags to your post type a tag into the box below and click the "Add Tag" button.
Add Tag