The Gravy Train: An Inside Look at the Long Island Rail Road [Paperback]

Dan Ruppert (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: July 6, 2006

Climb on Board The Gravy Train, and tak a look at the Inner workings of the government-subsidized agency responsible for one of the most inefficient railroads in the United States

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Dan Ruppert is an industrial-manufacturing engineering with over twenty-five years of experience. Born in Brooklyn, New York in 1950, his family would move to Nassua County not far from the Long Island Rail Road main line. Growing up in the suburbs, he would become an avid train watcher spending his spare time at the local train stations. After completing high school, he would do stints at various jobs inlcuding mailman, local beer delivery truck driver and long distance truck driver. These jobs would provide the impetus for higher education and college would be the next step. With finances being tight and the need to fund his education, he secured a job driving school and charter buses with a local bus company. This position offered a schedule that dovetailed with attending day and night classes at college.

After graduating college in 1976, he would enter the realm of corporate management with employers including aircraft manufacturer Fairchild-Republic Corporation. In 1978 he was recruited by the Sikorsky Helicopter Division of United Technologies Corporation in Strattford, Connecticut. His assignments included developing the assembly methology for newly commercial and military helicopter programs. These programs inlcuded Blackhawk and Super Stallion helicopters. He would be promoted to a supervisory position with in the industrial engineering department and responsibilities were expanded to include cost and labor performance. Additional assignments included the established of programs to completely refurbish helicopters with over twenty years service in the field.

In 1983 an opportunity with the Long Island Rail Road would change his career path. This position required the analysis and evaluation of railcar maintenance operations performed in facilities designed and constructed predominantly in the 19th century. He was responsible for developing the layouts and labor performance standards for a state of the art maintenance and repair facility for railcars constructed in Queens, New York. Promoted to Manager of Manufacturing Engineering he identified new methodologies and to improve the quality of the repairs, worker productivity and handling of parts and components. A management mindset within the LIRR that lacked the impetus and ability to operate an efficient operation would ultimately drive him back to the private sector.

He is currently the president of an equipment company providing material handling and storage systems for warehousing and manufacturing operations. He performs industrial engineering studies, develops facilities layouts and furnishes a full range of equipment to improve space utilization, labor efficiency and order picking accuracy. His projects typically include new facilities, consolidation of satellite facilities and reconfiguring existing operations. His clients are private sector companies looking to reduce costs and improve customer service levels.

He resides in Long Island with his wife and two children and is a member of several business and professional organizations.

Product Details

• Paperback: 126 pages
• Publisher: Trafford Publishing (July 6, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 155395484X
• ISBN-13: 978-1553954842
• Product Dimensions: 8.9 x 6.3 x 0.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 9.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #570,436 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

13 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Only the tip of the iceberg.., April 11, 2003

By A Customer

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This review is from: The Gravy Train: An Inside Look at the Long Island Rail Road (Paperback)

I also was employeed by the LIRR during many of the same years that are detailed in this book. Change some of the specific situations and it describes my experience also. On my third day of employment a senior LIRR employee said to me "Slow down - your making us look bad." No, your poor attitude and work habits are making you look bad.

The "good enough for the LIRR" attitude, the nepotism and the extreme inefficiency simply cannot be believed - unless one works there and sees it first hand.

Every politician in Albany should be required to read this.

Taxpayers are being soaked for BILLIONS and receive only [bad] service in return.

What is really amazing is that all this happens every day, in broad daylight and is generally known by almost everyone.

See [website] for more information about this giant money wasting organization...

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Misery train, February 19, 2011

By 

Craig Bolon "persistentreader" (Massachusetts, United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Gravy Train: An Inside Look at the Long Island Rail Road (Paperback)

For the most part, Mr. Ruppert appears to be what people might call a straight player. He knocked around for a few years after high school, before settling down to get an engineering degree, while driving buses part-time. Then he worked about seven years as an industrial engineer at Sikorsky in Stratford, Connecticut.

Mr. Ruppert was attracted by an opportunity to work as part of the team designing and implementing a major new maintenance facility for the Long Island Rail Road in the 1980s: the Hillside yard on the Main Line (Hempstead branch), just east of Jamaica station, which opened in 1991. The state of New York invested near a half billion dollars in the facility. Mr. Ruppert tells why, despite major public support and first-class equipment, Hillside did little to improve the poor state of LIRR maintenance.

Mr. Ruppert describes many positive experiences with other members of the facility engineering team and a few positive experiences with long-time LIRR employees. However, he quickly noticed featherbedding and gross waste of resources. In several episodes, he documented ineffective work patterns, and he sought to plan the portions of Hillside for which he was responsible to help correct what he identified as chronic problems.

Mr. Ruppert stayed at LIRR about nine years and saw Hillside through design, construction, equipping and worker training. After Hillside opened, since he did not join the LIRR culture, he became a misfit. It took him about a year to see that there was no future for him at LIRR. He was lucky to find other engineering employment in the early 1990s. He published "The Gravy Train" about ten years later.

For a working engineer with a little experience in local politics, "The Gravy Train" proved a painful read. Since LIRR is a politically saturated public enterprise, Mr. Ruppert's background made him wholly unprepared to work there. There is no sign in his background that he ever engaged in political organizing. He seems to have trusted Long Island politicians, although he had a disappointing experience with one after leaving LIRR.

The main rule of work at a politically saturated public enterprise is "Don't rock the boat." Mr. Ruppert's job assignments, as well as his personal leanings, led him to rock the boat frequently. Not surprisingly, toward the end of his tenure at LIRR he saw vandalism, damaging key features of the new Hempstead yard, that almost had to be done by LIRR employees. He and his wife were physically threatened.

To have lasted as long as he did, Mr. Ruppert probably acquired and practiced some political skills he does not put on primary display in his book. He mentions a couple of interactions with LIRR upper management, but he did not seem to have handled those opportunities well, and they mainly produced grief. After leaving LIRR he has tried to spur investigations of it, but so far he has had no notable success.

"The Gravy Train" is rich with observations specific to the LIRR environments. Mr. Ruppert makes no attempt to generalize them. That is up to the reader. While LIRR is widely cited as the most wasteful and least effective commuter railroad in North America, similar problems are likely to afflict public transportation elsewhere, at least to some degree, wherever there is also a politically saturated public enterprise.

Experiences in public transportation elsewhere show that there is no formula solution to the kinds of problems Mr. Ruppert describes. Contracting out services, in particular, has not worked reliably. Specialized knowledge and certifications needed for key parts of the work, plus obligations in many places to accommodate unions, essentially oblige new management to hire old workers, who tend to perpetuate the work cultures.

The disappointing feature of Mr. Ruppert's book, of course, is that he persists with an engineering vision and does not describe credible ways to improve many of the situations he describes. Solutions, when they can be found, will clearly involve more than engineering. Mr. Ruppert might make substantial contributions to an agency overhaul that somehow navigates political shoals and develops strong, reliable backing.

3.0 out of 5 stars Excessively good detail, yet written with an unignorable bias, September 21, 2010

By 

Kriston Rehberg (Fairfax, VA USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Gravy Train: An Inside Look at the Long Island Rail Road (Kindle Edition)

This book has excessively good detail about several projects the author had been involved in modernizing the Long Island Rail Road. It appears to be authentic, but the bias is too obvious. The LIRR, in the author's view, is the epitome of an organization paralyzed by unionism. The supposedly amazing efficiencies proposed and implemented by the author were supposedly undone to further the union's vice-like grip on the LIRR.

I have an impartial view, but I am left with a yearning to know more about the "other" side of the story and the real reasons why his ideas were rejected, subverted, and/or placated. Was the author really an ignored reformer? I cannot know after reading this enjoyable book. I need more context to understand what happened during the author's tenure at the Long Island Rail Road from a different point of view.