Willie R. Tubbs, FISM News

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On Thursday, Amtrak President Stephen Gardner told a House committee that his company faced the prospect of reducing its services because of a lack of manpower that will arise should current vaccination trends and punishments for those who remain unvaccinated continue. 

While testifying to the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee’s Railroads, Pipelines, and Hazardous Materials subcommittee, Gardner warned that delays, cancelations, and reductions in service could become a reality in early January, when a federal mandate takes effect that will require all federal employees be vaccinated or fired. 

While the mandate would impact only about 5 percent of Amtrak’s workforce – Gardner testified about 95 percent of Amtrak employees are at least partially vaccinated – the company president indicated this reduction would severely hamper Amtrak’s ability to serve its customers. 

“Amtrak has strongly advocated that all our employees to be vaccinated and we have made great progress in achieving this important public health goal,” Gardner said. He later added, “because many engineers, conductors and on-board service employees retired or left Amtrak during the pandemic, and we temporarily halted hiring due to funding uncertainty and Covid-related distancing requirements that inhibited training, we anticipate that we will not initially have enough employees to operate all the trains we are currently operating when the federal mandate takes effect.”

Gardner said the biggest risk will be to long-distance trips, where employees at rural stops have proven more resistant to getting vaccinated and would also be more difficult to replace.  

“At some of these crew bases across our network, we have a relatively high percentage of unvaccinated employees,” Gardner said. “If those employees chose to not get vaccinated by the deadline, we will not have sufficient trained staff to support current service frequency on affected routes, as engineers and conductors must undergo extensive training both when hired or promoted and to become qualified on the characteristics of each route on which they work.”

Gardner, who said he believes any slowdown would be temporary, said he planned to release more information on locations and services that could be lost as early as next week.