The Seven Secrets of the Metroliner's Success
Shapiro, Walter
The seven secrets of the Metroliner’s success by Walter Shapiro Government has become synonymous with failure. The situation is so bleak that the new intellectual pastime is determining the...
...But without the 1967 deadline, 1968 would not have brought a series of public inquiries about why the Metroliner was delayed...
...Lunching in 1962 with Arthur Krock, then The New York Times’ Washington bureau chief and an old fanuly friend, Pell mentioned his plan as something which might be suitable for The New York Times Magazine...
...In 1967 alone, The New York Times ran more than a dozen stories on the Metroliner and its production delays, and the Washington and Philadelphia papers also followed it closely...
...At times we felt he was either a bloody ass or a genius...
...In 1965, the Metroliner project itself was started in the new Office of High Speed Ground Transportation and survived a 1967 shift from Commerce to the newly created Department of Transportation (DOT) that would have sidetracked many larger programs...
...What is needed is the kind of project director who is called “a tough son of a bitch” but gets the job done...
...In the beginning, the key to Nelson’s autonomy was White House support for the Metroliner...
...It was endless...
...While risky when dealing with other branches of the government with their own access to the President, this strategy is virtually foolproof when dealing with those outside the government, who are in no position to call your bluff...
...Hell, no,” replied Kelson...
...Determined to avoid future debacles, we have tried assiduously to absorb the depressing lessons of the 1960s...
...From this it’s easy to understand the typical bureaucrat’s aversion to goals and deadlines...
...Set up on a temporary basis in 1963, it had only a vague mandate to examine rail passenger service between Boston and Washington...
...Nelson said that when he discovered this, “I literally raised hell...
...For Apollo began with Webb...
...The interest of the GOP conservative in a railroad project more than 2,000 miles east of his constituents stemmed from a close working relationship that Nelson had developed with Paul Weyrich, one of Allott’s aides...
...The hearings, like the newspaper stories which preceded them, put pressure on the contractors where it hurt-right in the middle of their public image...
...At a time when clogged highways and overstacked airports have become environmentalist cliches, the Metroliner experiment has proven that when given adequate service, the public will still ride trains-our most ecologically sound method of transportation...
...If one man claimed he didn’t know the reason for a certain delay, Allott turned to the next and demanded an answer...
...But some of his ideas seemed to be lifted from Walt Disney ’s Tomorrowland as the Senator conjured up visions of monorails, air-cushioned vehicles, and even rocket-propelled trains traveling the Northeast corridor...
...The Rhode Island Democrat presented the President with a terse memo on the program-stressing the total electoral vote represented by the states in the Northeast corridor...
...Step Four-Project Autonomy “I had far more decision-making power than anyone over at the Pennsylvania Railroad except for Stuart Saunders,” Nelson recalled...
...The Senator’s interventionand the aid of the Budget Bureau, which was trying to relinquish its role as the government’s expert on a third-rate subject like passenger trains -led to the creation of the Northeast Corridor Project in 1963...
...It also didn’t hurt that Nelson taught in the home state of Warren Magnuson, chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee...
...A clear objective provides a sense of mission where otherwise there would be bureaucratic lassitude...
...Enter an unlikely hero...
...A clear picture of Bob Nelson was provided by a colleague from the Department of Transportation, “He was abrasive, difficult, and terribly obstinate...
...I believe that commitments once made should be honored...
...The absence of a clear-cut purpose also explains why Robert Nelson, the project’s director, said, “At the time of the Kennedy assassination we were just floundering...
...His successor, John Connors, was far more interested in national economic policy than he was in running the Commerce Department, and his preoccupation with White House intrigues permitted Alan Boyd, Undersecretary of Commerce for Transportation, to exercise broad authority...
...Saunders and the railroad weren’t sure how much influence Nelson had on the government’s decision to approve the Penn Central merger, but they couldn’t take chances...
...Step One-A Clear Goal A successful project can easily be distinguished from other bureaucratic efforts by the clarity of its goal...
...It should be clear by now that any office following its own goals, operating on its own timetable (see step five), can’t afford to yield authority to external bureaucratic forces...
...In retrospect, Pell’s ideas about railroads seem quaintly naive on the one hand and fuzzily futuristic on the other...
...With help from groups like this, creating the Metroliner was almost analogous to constructing a battleship from old chewing-gum wrappers...
...Nelson was equally firm when the PRR’s President Saunders announced that the railroad wanted Budd to postpone delivery of Metroliner cars until after the merger because of complicated railroad-stock transfers...
...Passenger trains had few defenders during the early 1960s’ and it must have taken a deep reluctance to fly and many long nights on sidings outside Trenton to turn Pell into Congress’ leading advocate of improved rail service...
...But against the backdrop of current cynicism, it is difficult to suggest that we can learn from the government’s successes-as well as its failures-without sounding like a character out of Barn bi...
...By 1968 Nelson had developed a rapport with a wide variety of legislators...
...The roots of the high-speed train are in the Northeast Corridor Project set up in the Commerce Department in 1963...
...But they do help give some idea how the good things happen...
...Finding enough of these governmental mavericks to keep a project going is an administrator’s hardest task...
...The history of the Northeast Corridor Project indicates the kind of focus firm goals can provide...
...Newspaper involvement in the project began with Claiborne Pell’s scherne for a multistate transportation pact...
...The Metroliner project director achieved it, even after being forced to mesh with two government departmentsCommerce and Transportation...
...Since linking the Northeast Corridor to a plan to upgrade rail service firom Wac0 to El Paso was unlikely, Pell took a different tack, appealing to Johnson’s political instincts in an election year...
...Visibility is only a step away from evaluation...
...If Stuart Saunders hadn’t been on the scene,” said Jim Diffenderfer, the PRR official who proposed a new train, “the Metroliner project wouldn’t have gotten started...
...The number of transportation officials within Commerce was few enough so that Nelson’s Office of High Speed Ground Transportation acted as an extension of Undersecretary Boyd’s personal staff...
...Here was the government trying to create one of the world’s most technologically advanced trains in conjunction with a railroad that was being systematically looted by its officers in the unseen prelude to the biggest bankruptcy in American business history...
...The creation of a new cabinet department is to bureaucrats what the Oklahoma land rush was to homesteaders...
...Nelson could effectively stage-manage his public deadlines only because the press took them seriously...
...Step Six-Project Visibility From the outset, the Metroliner was a unique program-it attracted public attention...
...Once the bill authorizing the Metroliner passed Congress in 1965, Bob Nelson was in the newspapers (see step six) predicting the trains would be running by October, 1967...
...Although the bureaucracy can still thwart a project which has presidential support, it is virtually impossible for a program to succeed without strong White House backingor the appearance of it...
...all the government’s contract with the railroad mandated was a trip of less than three hours...
...All it took was for Nelson to ask, “How much would it cost to set up a demonstration project that would cut an hour off the running time to New York...
...Pell played the role of catalyst to perfection, convincing two different administrations of the need for improved passenger service...
...Unlike most government procurement contracts, authority for the actual construction of Metroliner rested with the railroad, which was putting up most of the money...
...Instead, Nelson’s office became a division of the Federal Railroad Administration, almost the equivalent of exile to bureaucratic Siberia...
...Amid a host of uncompleted programs, the 1960s managed to give birth to the Metroliner, the modern, electric-powered train which makes the 231-mile trip between New York and Washington in less than three hours...
...Boyd, hoping to eventually be named to the new post of Secretary of Transportation, was also sensitive to White House sponsorship of the Metroliner project and gave Nelson virtually a free hand during the critical period in 1966 when the contract with the PRR was under negotiation...
...The one which...
...Analyzing the complex history of the Metroliner project, seven simple steps seem to account for its success...
...This relationship was complicated by the 1968 merger that transformed the Pennsylvania Railroad into part of the soon-to-be-bankrupt Penn Central sysitem...
...Few in the railroad business have fond memories of Bob Nelson...
...Completing anything, therefore, is a threatening experience because each finished task may bring retirement or dismissal one step closer...
...Instead, Krock transformed Pell’s vielws into a frontpage story and the impact of this article emboldened Pell to take his proposal to President Kennedy...
...generally a catalyst is needed to at tract the President’s attention...
...There is a minor catch...
...Counting travel to and from the airport, a plane flight from New York to Washington took more than two hours...
...Nelson had nothing to lose by a public airing of the controversy, since even if the hearing backfired, no additional congressional funding was required to complete the project...
...Step Two-Presidential Involvement In almost every account of prerevolutionary Russia there was an obligatory scene: an old woman watching Cossack troops loot her village, murmurs prayerfully, “If the Tsar only knew...
...But in this case, banishment had its compensations...
...A simple purchase order might have taken months to be executed...
...Too many government workers resemble characters out of a Beckett play, sitting at their desks and waiting to be told what to do...
...Although the Metroliner obviously did not match the complexity of a moon launch, the task of building an entirely new train from scratch did present some unique problems...
...Gordon Murray of the Budget Bureau played a key role in selecting Nelson, whom he knew from professional conferences...
...They are not foolproof...
...No one could tell him, “We used to do it this way...
...The result was what one railroad official called “the worst contract ever negotiated in the 1 20-year history of the Pennsylvania Railroad...
...Walter Shapiro is an editor of The Washington Monthly...
...After a few well-publicized speeches on the subject, Pell, whose ties with President Kennedy were both political and personal, approached the White House...
...The seven steps are not classified information, but a look at the average federal employee explains why they are so rarely applied...
...If the Metroliner had been an ordinary project, the scenario Nelson and his small office would have faced in the Commerce Department might have gone something like this: To negotiate a contract they would have had to call in Department lawyers...
...Since many recognize the fundamental uselessness of their work, they are hounded by the continuing fear that someday someone will catch on and their jobs will be abolished...
...When asked about Nelson or the Metroliner, officials of the Budd Company, the project’s prime contractor, will only say, “It’s a good train and we will not comment on past difficulties...
...While the wisdom of the goal is not necessarily important (witness the space program), its existence is indispensible...
...Aware that the railroad’s enthusiasm for the project would quickly wane following approval of their cherished merger, Nelson saw the October, 1967, date as a bargaining chip rather than a realistic projection...
...Jim Diffenderfer, who played a key role in promoting the Metroliner at the Pennsylvania Railroad, chuckles as he recalls how Nelson’s name was “poison around here.’’ Now with Penn Central, Diffenderfer said, “I used to be castigated for defending him...
...Tall and white-haired, more interested in freight rates than railroad memorabilia, Nelson is not the sort to talk about the romance of the train whistle in the night...
...But o utside intervention was needed in late 1967 to prevent Nelson’s office from being subdivided as part of a DOT reorganization effort...
...At times, Pell just seemed to long for a return to the gentility which characterized the European railroads he remembered from his youth in a diplomatic family...
...But with the Penn Central merger in the offing, the reasons for his sudden interest in the Metroliner were not difficult to detect . If $400,000 gifts to the Republican Party are how corporations like ITT get mergers approved in the Nixon Administration, providing capital for projects like high-speed trains was how things got done in the Johnson years...
...Although isolation might have been fatal if Nelson had had no preexisting relationship with Boyd or powerful friends outside DOT, the new arrangement worked...
...Not only did NASA have secure access to the White House before Apollo, but it was President Kennedy himself who publicly declared the national objective of landing a man on the moon...
...Here was a contractor, the Budd Company, which had remained in the railroad-car building business largely out of habit, working on only a handful of new projects since World War 11...
...If the Metroliner had not been a priority project, the contract with the PRR might have been shaped more by a Commerce lawyer than by Nelson himself...
...The space program adjusted for this by having not one, but two deadlines: 1. to get a man to the moon before the Russians...
...He’d see right through them and call their bluff...
...But the goal of a New York-to-Washington trip in less than three hours has resulted in trains with running times of exactly 2:59...
...Even more striking was the tenor of the hearings...
...Although his background is far different from the wheeler-dealer world of Oklahoma oil, Bob Nelson shared a number of traits with Jim Webb...
...The government’s investment was not much more than a paltry $10 million, with the railroad contributing $55 million...
...Hodges set the pattern by making every effort to give Nelson free rein...
...to order desks or typewriters they would have had to contact the Department’s purchasing office...
...Goals imply that a project can be completed and timetables-most ominously of alltell when it will be finished...
...The Pennsylvania Railroad’s interest in the Metroliner indicates the benefits of maintaining an aura of presidential support...
...Admittedly, in the last decade, the notion that government can’t do anything right has been backed by some pretty convincing evidence...
...On the other hand, who wouldn’t leave the office early on Friday afternoon when all that was pending were projections of personnel needs for the General Services Administration...
...Despite the problems, the Metroliner has been an unqualified success, starting with its first run in January, 1969...
...I have no doubt,” said Bob Nelson, “that Saunders’ softness in negotiating the Metroliner contract with the government can be directly related to his feeling that this was one of the things he had to do to get the Penn Central merger approved...
...Each one of these divisions had priorities far different from those of Nelson and his office...
...Although subcommittee Chairman John Stennis opened the hearings, Allott presided over virtually the entire session (one of the rare occasions since the Democrats captured the Senate in 1955 that a Republican has run a televised hearing...
...Following the landing, newspaper editorials repeatedly asked, “If the government can send a man to the moon, why can’t it repair those potholes on Main Street...
...In seeking specific goals, you only get what you ask for, No matter what the objective, it will not be surpassed...
...The public’s interest in the Metroliner was not hard to understand...
...The situation is so bleak that the new intellectual pastime is determining the last time in American history when everything actually worked-some choose World War 11, and modernists hold out for the middle years of the Eisenhower Administration...
...The space program’s very extravagance prevented it from being taken as anything more than an expensive curiosity...
...Under the Tsar, a word or two from the right grand duke could have far more impact than days of demonstrations before the Winter Palace...
...It’s not the federal government’s business what the Pennsylvania Railroad’s cash balance is at the time of the merger...
...There is a severity about him, a kind of intellectual Calvinism, which meshes with the frugality of the Metroliner project in an era of cost overruns and inflated promises...
...Since in 1964 passenger trains seemed almost as risky a proposition as dirigibles, the initial White House decision was to make this a low-budget effort...
...Here again the space program provides a model...
...No longer could Nelson count on help from a White House, far too preoccupied with the Vietnam war to notice minor domestic projects...
...But Apollo is the exception...
...Saunders, the railroad’s president and later one of the unquestioned villains of the Penn Central bankruptcy, was never known for his compassion for passengers...
...But Pell’s role did not require ideas, just access...
...and 2. when it appeared that the Russians were in no hurry to get there, a lunar landing by the end of the 1960s...
...Recalling his anger at the failure of the railroad and its contractors to honor their contract for the production of the train, Nelson said, “I’m old fashioned...
...Open-ended goals like these are what make bureaucracy thrive...
...The Pennsy in fact had recently turned down an in-house proposal for a new New Y ork-to-Washington train because investment capital was tight and most of the railroad’s top management believed their own public rhetoric about passenger service being inherently unprofitable...
...Like Webb, Nelson was there at the beginning...
...Although the Pennsylvania Railroad’s best train did the trip in 3:35, the average trip was over four hours...
...and anyway, even the most innocent publicity may somehow spark an investigation...
...Unlike most deadlines, Nelson’s public timetable wasn’t designed to stimulate the federal bureaucracy, it was meant to motivate the equally intractable railroad and its contractors...
...Little in Nelson’s background prepared him for the cutthroat world of bureaucratic infighting, but he had learned the game by 1965 when he became director of the new Office of High Speed Ground Transportation...
...At a time when passenger service had deteriorated to a level reminiscent of third-class coaches on the old Trans-Siberian Railroad, a partnership between the government and Penn Central to improve service was not designed to inspire confidence...
...But the real explanation was an absence of motive...
...Because the government’s contract was only with the railroad and not with the Budd Company, it took Nelson several months to discover that Saunders had ordered the contractor to delay Metroliner production anyway...
...Since the Metroliner’s technical complexity was well beyond the contractors’ initial production capacity, the train could never have been ready by the 1967 deadline, even with everyone’s full cooperation...
...The glamor of NASA and its lavish budget gave the space program freedom from many bureaucratic roadblocks...
...I forced them to put on another production line...
...For more than a decade the New York City subway system was virtually Budd’s only customer...
...As a public pillory, it was highly effective...
...Luther Hodges, Kennedy’s Secretary of Commerce, had grave and well-justified fears about not being reappointed after the 1964 elections and was understandably sensitive to White House whim...
...The archetype for this breed was Jim Webb, who ran the Apollo program...
...Webb, like the ideal director, was there from the beginning...
...It took presidential intervention-a request for permanent legislation to improve rail service in the Northeastto get the project moving (see step two...
...But the Metroliner did not have it nearly as easy...
...It’s easy to wonder whether the Senator would have been interested in railroads at all if service had been better on the sleeper he rode regularly from Providence to Washington...
...Without the 1968 furor, the train would never have been ready in early 1969...
...A year later, with a Texan as President, Pell feared i:he end of White House interest in Boston-to-Washington train service...
...When program delays began to snowball, Nelson decided the time was right for that classic scene-the angry congressional hearing...
...Luring business#men and other travelers off the Eastern Airlines shuttle, the Metroliner’s 14 round trips a day have brightened AMTRAK’s balance sheet with profits of just under $10 millimon in 1972...
...And for that there are unfortunately no easy formulas...
...For one thing, being away from the Secretary’s office freed Nelson from the distracting political battles which accompany the creation of any new cabinet department...
...The railroad’s feelings about Nelson are easily understood...
...In this case, all it took was for Johnson to scrawl on the Pell memo, “Tell Commerce to get off its ass on this,” and the Metroliner program was under way . Even long after a President’s attention has shifted elsewhere, a skillful project director (see step three) can nurture the illusion of continuing White House involvement...
...Nelson was interested in only one thing-the construction of the Metroliner...
...With the Apollo program it was to put a man on the moon...
...In early 1966, for example, he talked to a “federal official” about getting the White House to postpone announcing approval of the Penn Central merger until after Metroliner contract negotiations were finished...
...But there’s more to the Metroliner story than just profits...
...Picture the situation...
...Obviously, if you are going to the moon this is not a major problem...
...A professor of transportation economics at the University of Washington when he was recruited to head the Northeast Corridor Project in 1963, Nelson recalls that he “wasn’t very much interested in pass e nger transportation at that time...
...He hated guys who didn’t know what they were talking about...
...Obviously, that wasn’t the way they did things in the railroad business...
...The problem with Bob Nellson was that he hated incompetence...
...Admittedly, project autonomy and friends in the White House and on Capitol Hill have their appeal, but for the wrong reasons...
...The seven secrets of the Metroliner’s success by Walter Shapiro Government has become synonymous with failure...
...Webb’s roots were in the oil business of Oklahoma Senator Robert Kerr, but he wasn’t a politician...
...A. Scheffer Lang, the federal railroad administrator, had worked with Nelson in the Commerce Department and was sympathetic to the project...
...There was, for example, another project with both modest goals and funding which followed many of the same patterns as the space program and worked...
...to hire an assistant they would have had to go through the Commerce personnel office...
...Sisyphus, eternally pushing the same boulder up the same hill, had the perfect government job...
...Vast sums were not spent on the project...
...Step Five-A Timetable Without firm deadlines, the government operates with a languor that three-toed sloths might envy...
...Who would dare take a three-hour lunch when we had to get to the moon before the Russians...
...But Nelson nonetheless credits Allott’s hearings with bringing the “Metroliner into operation a year to a year and a half in advance of what it normally would.’’ The hearings were unusual...
...Step Three-The Man Despite all the civics-book rhetoric about government being made of laws not men, nothing could be farther from the truth in the quest for a successful project...
...If the President only knew,” might be inscribed on the walls of every federal office as a monument to all unsuccessful projects, both past and future...
...But not all bureaucrats fit these stereotypes...
...Perhaps my most important contribution to the Metroliner,” said Lang, “was to keep the bureaucrats and the powergrabbers away from Nelson so he could get his work done in peace...
...But this question was primarily rhetorical-no one looked seriously at the Apollo program for clues about how anything might be fixed...
...With the Metroliner the objective was to build a train which could make the trip between New York and Washington in less than three hours...
...Obviously, a project which could cut an hour off travel time from New York to Washington has more widespread appeal than a reorganization of the field offices of the Manpower Administration...
...A non-stop Metroliner which made the trip in 2:30 was quickly abandoned, for reasons ranging from poor scheduling to insufficient patronage to high maintenance costs...
...Building the Metroliner required the PRR to invest $55 million in a prloject where the lion’s share of the credit would go to the federal government...
...If this was the strategy behind the Senate Appropriations subcommittee hearings on the Metroliner in early June, 1968, then Republican Senator Gordon Allott of Colorado played the leading role...
...Neither are characteristics of an average bureaucrat.’’ But then, how many trains have average bureaucrats built lately...
...It became a question of the lesser of two evils, and finishing the Metroliner was infinitely preferable to continued adverse publicity...
...Understanding Nelson starts with his own simple admission, “I’m no train buff...
...Nelson managed to avoid most pitfalls of bureaucratic life by obtaining special status for the Metroliner through the support of two successive Secretaries of Commerce...
...Even today the mere mention of his name in Penn Central offices creates involuntary shudders...
...It’s a rare government official who has anything resembling the authority of a corporation president, but this kind of autonomy is needed to overcome bureaucratic inertia...
...and get the answer, “Not much,” and the Metroliner was born...
...Step Seven-Friends on the Hill Claiborne Pell and Warren Magnuson were not the only senators keeping track of the Metroliner...
...But there were elements in Apollo that just weren’t that unique...
...Bob Nelson had freedom of action from the outset, but most administrators aren’t so lucky...
...For most government workers, autonomy doesn’t mean freedom to get the job done, it means the freedom to be left alone...
...Part of the problem is simply a scarcity of programs that worked...
...When the Department of Transportation was set up in early 1967, Nelson had hoped to continue his close relationship with Alan Boyd, the new Transportation Secretary...
...For the next three weeks I was sitting on Budd’s doorstep...
...many were impressed with the clarity of his presentations during budget hearings...
...Apollo began under the supervision of Vice President Johnson, and when he succeeded to the presidency, success was written in the sky...
...Bob Nelson had a hypothesis that transportation demand was particularly sensitive to time savings...
...There are a few eccentrics who really want to get the job done...
...With the Metroliner, access to the President was through Rhode Island’s patrician Senator Claiborne Pell...
...The Senator also had a political motivation for sponsoring the hearingshe seized upon the Metroliner as an example of the Great Society’s inability to even make the trains run on time...
...In this case, however, it created the Metroliner because the Office of High Speed Ground Transportation was set up with a firm objective...
...A new department means a new hierarchy-with favored projects often directly linked to the secretary’s office, where they flourish in the glare of high-level attention...
...springs most quickly to mind is NASA’s Apollo program, which put a man on the moon...
...Men’s fates were often decided by a nod from the Tsar...
...This time, a call from Senator Warren Magnuson (see step seven) to Alan Boyd was all that was needed to keep Nelson’s domain intact...
...Senator Pell’s pet notion was a multi-state transportation pact, modeled after the New York Port Authority, to run railroad service from Boston to Washington...
...Allott, like a Capitol Hill Perry Mason, lined up Nelson and representatives of the Penn Central and the three contractors at the witness table and questioned them collectively...
...Friends in high places are just another form of job security-“just let them try to abolish my job, and I’ll have half the Congress on their backs in no time...
...Webb’s aim wasn’t making friends or keeping bureaucrats happy, it was landing a man on the moon...
...A dynamic administrator running the whole show is worse-he may even upset the status quo, being so new to government that he won’t take sloth and inefficiency for granted...
...no one could challenge his authority by claiming a superior knowledge of the project...
...Such parsimony normally creates $30-million worth of inconclusive feasibility studies...
Vol. 5 • March 1973 • No. 1
