Amtrak's Gutter Punk CEO

He took the midnight train going anywhere.

I lied. Amtrak’s CEO is not a gutter punk.

But he was (is?) a punk who liked(s) trains. Which makes him adjacent to the moniker.

And now he’s the CEO of the National Railroad Passenger Corporation…

…And that kind of makes him Amtrak’s Gutter Punk CEO.

What am I listening to?

Windmill - Lorelei

Making Tracks, Train Tracks, Amtrak. That tracks.

If you’re like me, you might be surprised to find out that the term “gutter punk” actually has a real definition. According to Wikipedia, a gutter punk “is a homeless or transient individual who displays a variety of specific lifestyle traits and characteristics that often, but not always, are associated with the punk subculture.”

This is news to me, who has always defined gutter punk as “crust punks, but somehow wet”. But both definitions imply that punks who look scrappy, disheveled, and a bit filthy are drifters and low-lifes. Gutter punks are also typically viewed as transients who are frequently unhoused, or participate in hitchhiking and train-hopping.

Which is why I am making the bold claim that Amtrak’s CEO Stephen Gardner is kind of a gutter punk based on the train association alone. Oh and that fact that he was in a bunch of punk bands and experimental music groups in the 1990s.

You have got to be asking yourself by now: “How does the bass player of a 90s D.C. post-punk band end up running Amtrak?”

The answer is by devoting your entire professional career to transportation when you’re not tracking bass or playing a gig. Gardner came of age in the Washington D.C. punk scene in the 1990s (jealous!) — being the bass player for the band Lorelei and then breaking off to form the experimental music group Chessie, which was named after the Chesapeake and Ohio Railway. Both are seriously good in their own right, but Chessie’s music had a unique vision: “to explore the way that railroads bisect the natural world with machinery.”

Gardner took that vision into his early professional career as an intern at Union Station at the age of 18. His father was the Arlington County Manager when he was growing up, so he had a lot of experience talking about public transportation around his kitchen table and accompanying his father around the county on official business — so an internship at a major transit hub seemed fitting. He went on to go to school for “physics, acoustics, political science, and transportation”, all the while making music and touring with artists.

After college, he bounced around working with trains in various capacity: freight trains up in Maine, dispatching in Boston, and working on various railroads down in Virginia. After a stint in Berlin to work on his music, he ended up back stateside working on the railroad subcommittee of the House of Representatives and then the Senate. This created the perfect path to good ol’ Amtrak, where he’s been since 2009 in various capacities until his ascension to CEO in 2022.

Gardner is extremely self-aware of his rare journey in this field, as he explained recently in an interview:

“It helps that not many people of my generation had much interest in railroads or transportation.”

Stephen the Train Stan™ has big dreams for his longstanding love. In 2021, President Biden’s trillion dollar infrastructure bill included the largest investment in Amtrak and passenger rail since 1971 (when Amtrak was created). He’s hoping to double ridership by 2040 (they’re currently ahead of where they were pre-pandemic, which is impressive), revitalize and modernize existing assets, and expand the network to more of America.

So…I’ll just leave this here for no reason at all:

CEOs suck — but I think we might want to spare Stephen Gardner in the revolution (for now). When asked if he’d be a part of any Lorelei or Chessie reunions any time soon, he said this:

“…music is a huge part of who I am. And I [still have] all of the, I think, [the] good lessons I learned making music and being in a great community of independent musicians and change-makers here in Washington.”

Ain’t that the fucking truth, Stevie. I couldn’t agree more that having experience in the punk community is a good weapon to wield in Washington.