WASHINGTON — Amtrak’s Office of Inspector General has released a report explaining how the company’s lack of effective parts inventory management is responsible for numerous service failures.
The 62-page report released Monday, “Asset management: Company has opportunities to more effectively manage and safeguard maintenance of equipment inventory,” asserts a lack of key parts to keep locomotives and passenger cars rolling has prompted mechanical department employees to take missing items from other equipment. The decision to delay restoration of Amtrak’s passenger car and locomotive fleet to pre-COVID 19 pandemic levels means there is less available rolling stock to “cannibalize,” resulting in tardy departures, cancellations, and “customer experience” downgrades.
On the other hand, the report found that as of September 2023, Amtrak was incurring expenses on $49 million worth of surplus or obsolete parts inventory it no longer needs.
During the past year, Inspector General analysts interviewed 145 material control group and mechanical department employees at 10 Amtrak facilities around the country. About 31% of these workers said it was a daily occurrence that a part they needed was unavailable; during later visits, 87% said it happened every week.
In calendar 2022, 900 pieces of equipment were sidelined a total of 13,000 days while out‐of‐stock inventory items were forwarded via expedited shipping. “Senior Mechanical officials agreed that unavailable inventory limits service capacity,” the report notes, “but the company does not know the extent to which unavailable inventory impacts operations because it does not track this information.”
Employees told interviewers they “must cannibalize parts every day while waiting for the facility to receive more stock, which can sometimes take several months. Time spent removing parts from other units increases mechanical employees’ workloads, but many told us they continue doing this to avoid holding units from service and to ensure that trains leave their facility on time.”
Researchers were told by all mechanical department employees spoken to during later site visits that “unavailable parts and materials affect morale at their facility to at least a moderate extent.”
Workers at several of the facilities said lack of parts led to departure delays and trains leaving terminals without sleeping or dining cars, forcing customer downgrades or compensation, but the report says Amtrak doesn’t track that information either.
Widespread parts shortages have also led to hoarding at many locations, which exacerbates the inventory imbalance shown in the report’s portrayal of a “self-perpetuating cannibalizing cycle.”
Amtrak management agreed to implement a series of seven recommended improvements to its parts ordering system, inventory controls, and tracking of delays caused by lack of spare parts as outlined in Appendix E at the end of the report. Most target completion dates for the reforms range from Sept. 30, 2024, to early 2025.
— Updated at 9:35 a.m. CT to clarify that parts cannibalized were not necessarily from operational equipment, and information on worker responses to question regarding parts unavailability.
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