Customer Reviews

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

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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...

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.

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.

I am a Railfan and a regular LIRR rider and I have to say that I have lost a lot of respect for the organization after reading this book. Give it a read, I'm sure you will agree with me.

It is unfortunate that Dan Ruppert was treated the way that he was and that the LIRR did not accept his recommendations.

While the LIRR management was completely wrong, Mr. Ruppert did not make me feel sorry for him. He came across in this book as being cold and heartless. It is no wonder that he couldn't get along with the personnel. He never tried to understand them. He thought that over-the-road truckers were handled the right way. It didn't matter to him the sleepless hours they had to spend on the road just to make a buck.

Mr. Ruppert should have started his book with a history of the treatment of the workers before there was a Railroad Brotherhood. My great-grandfather worked twelve hours a day, seven days a week for four-hundred dollars per year and he had a good job on the LIRR as an engineer/motorman. My grandfather had it better but he would not allow any of his children to work on the road. Yes, the abuses of the personnel gave way to the abuse of the system. Yet, there was a romance of the road that Mr. Ruppert never discovered.

His inherent coldness came through in the way he wrote the book. He disclosed little about himself and nothing good about anyone he worked with. Where did Mr. Ruppert live and grow up? What schools did he go to and what was his early life like.

I hope that Mr. Ruppert does not write any more books. At least, not until he spends many hours with a psychiatrist to understand himself better before he judges others.