Amtrak Names Gardner, Winbigler to New Exec Roles

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Gardner's new position appears to be the same as the old one, just with a new name. So probably no difference there. The interesting hire is the CFO. Her hire hints at two things: One she's an experienced private sector hire (CFO at REI) so she may be bringing sense to Amtrak's accounting. Secondly, the release heavily mentions her role in procurements at REI, which to me hints at Amtrak is planning to get heavily into buying new equipment (aka procurements).
 
Gardner's new position appears to be the same as the old one, just with a new name. So probably no difference there. The interesting hire is the CFO. Her hire hints at two things: One she's an experienced private sector hire (CFO at REI) so she may be bringing sense to Amtrak's accounting. Secondly, the release heavily mentions her role in procurements at REI, which to me hints at Amtrak is planning to get heavily into buying new equipment (aka procurements).

Agreed on both counts. Gardner’s position appears unchanged and I’ve actually heard him referred to that title a few times already. I’m looking forward to Winbigler’s tenure. If the press release is any indication, I hope that Amtrak is on the verge of a massive equipment and infrastructure overhaul. Lord knows they need it.
 
I doubt she'll straighten out the looney "allocation" based accounting in its entirety, but we can at least hope for better tracking of parts purchases, equipment maintenance, MOW purchases, etc (it is currently just flat-out guesswork on Amtrak's part what route and what account to assign this stuff to).
 
I doubt she'll straighten out the looney "allocation" based accounting in its entirety, but we can at least hope for better tracking of parts purchases, equipment maintenance, MOW purchases, etc (it is currently just flat-out guesswork on Amtrak's part what route and what account to assign this stuff to).

Do you mean in costs or physical equipment? I would be shocked if Amtrak doesn’t have some sort of equipment planning program in place to track cars and engines and to compile the following:

Maintenance records for each piece of equipment
Upcoming service for each piece of equipment
Faults detected/reported
Available equipment to draw from
Current disposition of all equipment (OOS, in-service (name service assigned), etc).
Location of equipment

If you mean costs, well, that’s outside of my area of expertise.
 
Well I was once in a truck dealership shop getting a new turbocharger. There was a Amtrak truck/railcar puller hybrid in a fence off area. I ask about it, they had it fixed and have been waiting for payment for several months.

Pretty common event for government owned equipment.

My company is not much better. The new yard trucks use DEF and since the driver were not report amount filled, our bulk tank when dry. So they started to buy 2.5 gallon containers of it. Very expensive way of getting DEF about x5 the cost. The vendor waited 3 months before billing us. The size of the bill was very impressive.

In short if your CFO has good cost accounting, then you should have cost control too. My employer needs to work on this, so does Amtrak.
 
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