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Amtrak's OIG faults equipment procurement.

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Asset Management: Integrating Sound Business Practices into its Fleet Planning Process Could Save Amtrak Hundreds of Millions of Dollars on Equipment Procurements, OIG-E-2013-014, dated May 28, 2013, presumably is the report being cited. The report was completed by a team from Inspections and Evaluations. It is one of three functional organizations reporting to the Inspector General.  The other two are audits and investigations. "The Office of Inspections and Evaluations (I&E) conducts targeted inspections and evaluations of Amtrak programs and operations to identify opportunities to improve cost efficiency and effectiveness, and the overall quality of service delivery throughout Amtrak."  In other words, it performs operational audits as opposed to financial audits. The Inspections and Evaluations group is directed by Calvin Evans.  Typically groups whose primary mission is operational audits or inspections are staffed by persons with a variety of disciplines, i.e. engineering, IT, economics, finance, operations research, statistics, etc.  It may have a CPA or two on the staff, but they are more likely to be found in the audit group.  I am curious, however, as to the make-up of the staff and, therefore, I have submitted a request to Amtrak for information on the education and experience of the members of the team that performed the inspection and wrote the aforesaid report. I have skimmed the report.  I plan to read it more thoroughly over the next week or so. I ran a search on multi-level passengers cars to see what the report said.  I could only find two references regarding multi-level passenger cars.  A search for bi-level passengers cars did not produce any results in the report, although it may have been mentioned in Boardman's response. The first reference to multi-level passenger cars is found on Page 4 of the report: "Amtrak has not adequately analyzed options to refurbish or repurpose existing equipment rather than buying new equipment, or to incorporate more efficient equipment types into its fleet, such as multi-level passenger cars."  Appendix II, which references prior recommendations to improve Amtrak's fleet planning process, contains this reference to multi-level passenger cars: "Multi-level Passenger Cars. Ensure that future strategy updates consider increasing the use of multi-level passenger coaches wherever practical and feasible." I did not find any OIG recommendation that Amtrak only use multi-level passenger cars.
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