Engagement Memo—Decommissioning Rolling Stock

Amtrak (the company) is buying billions of dollars of new rolling stock, including the NextGen Acela and Airo trainsets. As this new equipment becomes operational the company will need to begin decommissioning hundreds of pieces of legacy rolling stock, which will take years. Given the importance of this process to the company’s efficient operations, we are initiating a review of the company’s efforts to decommission and transition from its legacy equipment to new equipment.

Our objective will be to assess the extent to which the company is planning for and managing its rolling stock decommissioning process. We may expand our scope or modify our objective during the review. We plan to interview company officials, review available documentation, conduct site visits, and analyze relevant company data. We will work to minimize disruptions to the company by coordinating meetings with staff in advance.

We will perform our work in accordance with generally accepted government auditing standards. Our interactions with the company will be consistent with P/I 2.1.4, which sets forth the relationship between our office and the company. In particular, section 7.0 of the policy discusses coordination between company officials and our Office of Audits.

We request that your office arrange an entrance conference for us with the appropriate company officials at the earliest possible date. We will keep you advised of the status of our work and any material changes in our objective, should they occur.