(The following article by Alan Feuer was posted on the New York Times website on November 25.)
NEW YORK — If you are the sort who feels a transportational-historical chill when the conductor on the Long Island Rail Road calls out, “Next stop, Babylon! Babylon, next stop!” you will probably be intrigued by Raymond Kenny, the railroad’s acting president. Mr. Kenny is a railroad man’s railroad man, an up-from-the-yard guy who started in the business 36 years ago as a summer ticket clerk and now rides herd on a huge network of M1, M3 and M7 trains, 282,000 commuters and more than 700 miles of open track.
Recently, Mr. Kenny earned public kudos for coming up with a sensible and elegant solution to what has been a longstanding problem on the railroad: the gap between train doors and station platforms. He proposed simply moving the tracks.
“One advantage of having so much railroad experience,” he said, “is that I tend to focus not on what we can’t do, but on what we can do.”
Running a railroad is a complicated task, one which in its fickleness and convolutions is not unlike trying to coordinate the various mountebanks and tumblers who make up a traveling vaudeville show. In much the way a harried stage manager must contend with a tardy contortionist or an intoxicated strongman, the president of the LI-double-R struggles daily with downed trees at Ronkonkoma or multicar trains stalled in the bowels of Pennsylvania Station.
There are engineering questions: How to move 400 M7s daily through the Harold Interlocking in Sunnyside, Queens? Labor questions: What salary increase do the signalmen deserve? And fiscal questions: Who put that allocation for J Tower back in the budget?
And, of course, there was the question of the gap. For years, the railroad has tolerated gaps between its train doors and its station platforms, papering over the danger by posting signs that read, “Watch the Gap.” Then, in August, a woman, while under the influence of alcohol, fell through the gap at the station in Woodside, Queens, was struck by a train and died. The accident led to institutional hand-wringing in which it was decided that the platforms were far too heavy to move and that nothing could be done.
A month later, when Mr. Kenny was appointed acting president, he and his crew figured that if Muhammad could not make it to the mountain, perhaps the mountain might be moved to Muhammad. They determined that it was possible to simply shove the tracks a little closer to the platforms.
RAILROADING is a practical business, and Mr. Kenny, 55, came to it in a practical way. At age 14, he began commuting on the rails from his home in Cedarhurst, Nassau County, to Archbishop Molloy High School in Briarwood, Queens. The trek, five days a week, gave him ample time to study the complexities of the Jamaica Station where hundreds of trains pass daily in a transportational ballet on numerous switches and eight separate tracks.
“I developed an interest in the railroad on that commute,” he said. “Waiting at Jamaica I could see the operation, the trains moving simultaneously, the way they connected.”
It is worth noting that three decades later Mr. Kenny’s presidential desk affords a dead-on view of Jamaica’s Track 1. (And for those who believe, like Wordsworth, that the child is father to the man, Mr. Kenny’s foundational contact with the railroad was an old Lionel train set, O-27 gauge.)
Since 1970, Mr. Kenny has spent only one year not working for the railroad. That was the grim expanse between the end of his summer clerkship and the start of his true career. Like a young recruit impatient to enlist, he had applied to the railroad when he was 17. They told him to come back when he was 18. In the meantime, he worked in a clothing store until he got the clerk’s position. He did not care for the clothing job. “It was not a train job,” he said.
As far as train jobs go, Mr. Kenny has held his fair share, progressing steadily from junior industrial engineer to block operator to train dispatcher to manager of timetable schedules to field supervisor to supervisor of train movement to general superintendent of transportation to chief transportation officer to senior vice president for operations to acting president, a post in which he remains nostalgic for the old, ungainly, un-air-conditioned MP-54s of his youth.
Along the way, he says, he has met some good people (most notably Walter Ernst, the storied former Amtrak chief) and has gotten to employ some fairly Orwellian train jargon (including something called “mean distance between failure” which, though it sounds like something from an anger management course, is actually the number of miles a train can travel before breakdown).
“I bring a detailed knowledge of the operation to the job,” Mr. Kenny said. “I feel I can picture the entire system up in my mind.”
That is fairly impressive, given that the system extends from Penn Station in Midtown Manhattan all the way out to lonely Greenport on the eastern end of Long Island. There is no grid that charts the progress of his trains, although there is a frequently updated electronic report called Timacs that tells viewers the last station a train passed through. Mr. Kenny says he can digest the raw data and visualize the capillary network of the railroad in his head.
Still, the best part of the job is watching actual trains go by, especially those he can control.
“If I don’t see one in a while,” he said, “I just call somebody up.”