Today, January 19, is the birthday of the late John Riley, who would have been 52 today.
John was the administrator of the US Federal Railroad Administration during most of the Reagan administration. John was born and raised in New York, and moved to Minnesota after graduating from law school. After establishing a successful practice as a commercial litigator, John went to Washington with Senator David Durenberger in 1978 as his chief counsel, later chief of staff. John was instrumental in Sen. Durenberger's ( himself from a GN railroad family in St. Cloud, MN) forming the Senate Rail Caucus in about 1980.
John won the appointment to the FRA job in 1982. He was one of the people who recruited Graham Claytor to come out of retirement to lead Amtrak after the disastrous results of the Alan Boyd presidency during the Carter administration. John led a successful guerrilla fight for six years to sustain Amtrak funding against the continued assaults by David Stockman and his successors at the Office of Management and Budget. During this period, the President himself was benignly indifferent to the Amtrak issue, and submitted OMB's "zero" budget proposals for Amtrak due to the legal requirements of the Gramm-Rudman-Hollings Budget Control Act. Unlike the semi-libertarian zealots at OMB, Reagan himself had no problem with funding Amtrak. It was below his awareness. Then-Secretary of Transportation Elizabeth Dole tacitly supported John's efforts.
One year, John kept Amtrak from literally having to file a bankruptcy petition by getting the congressional committees to shift $40 million from a Coast Guard appropriation at the last minute. The USCG has never forgotten or forgiven Amtrak for that, either.
John opened the door to OMB in 1986 for the late Byron Nordberg and me to get to the senior staff there and persuade them that the solution to the "Amtrak problem" was not to kill it, but to allow it to expand carefully in its national system markets to earn its way to break-even. The senior professional staff accepted that strategy, and for the balance of the Reagan administration, OMB never again made a serious effort to eliminate Amtrak.
John returned to Minnesota in 1989, and was briefly Commissioner of Transportation, and chief of staff to Governor Carlson, before he was diagnosed with an aggressive tumor in his brain, from which he did not recover, despite two major surgeries at Johns Hopkins hospital in Baltimore.
John was a hugely enthusiastic supporter of Amtrak and passenger rail in all of its manifestations. He supported High Speed Rail as a concept because he saw that it gave politicians something "big" to associate their names with and to build in their districts. He was an unsung hero of the survival of Amtrak during one of its darkest hours in the period from 1980 through 1986. He is sorely missed by those of us fortunate enough to have known him during his lifetime.
-- Andrew Selden
Minneapolis
January 19, 1999