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Nelson, father of the Metrol
Topic Started: March 23 2009, 09:51 AM (46 Views)
Gandalf
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Robert A. Nelson, 89, a teacher and transportation authority who pushed for high-speed rail in the Northeast corridor and who was known as "the father of the Metroliner," died March 10 at his home in Springfield of complications of Alzheimer's disease.

In 1963, Dr. Nelson was teaching transportation economics at the University of Washington in Seattle when he was recruited by the Kennedy administration to head the Northeast Corridor Project, first as part of the Commerce Department and then the new Transportation Department.

As a member of President Lyndon B. Johnson's White House Task Force on Transportation Policy, he maintained that if trains could reduce by an hour the travel time between New York and Washington, a significant number of travelers would choose rail over planes and cars. In 1965, the Johnson White House created the Office of High Speed Ground Transportation, which Dr. Nelson headed for the next four years.

He commissioned a study by engineers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to predict transportation advances through 1980. In their report, the engineers envisioned jet-propelled rail-less trains whisking through enclosed tubes on a cushion of air, ferrying passengers from Washington to Boston in 2 1/2 hours. They anticipated highway speeds approaching 100 mph, with vehicles governed by an automated control system, and breakthroughs in vertical takeoff and landing aircraft.

Dr. Nelson wanted more immediate results. He prodded the Pennsylvania Railroad into signing a contract to demonstrate the viability of high-speed trains in the Washington-New York corridor. He leveraged White House support, congressional oversight hearings and media attention to keep pressure on the railroad and the manufacturer of the new railway cars. To the surprise of almost everyone, the first Metroliner demonstration trains began running in 1968.

In the March 1973 issue of Washington Monthly, writer Walter Shapiro labeled Dr. Nelson's accomplishment a rare government success story. Dr. Nelson, he wrote, was just the kind of stubborn, self-assured maverick needed to prod a cautious bureaucracy and a reluctant railroad to get a technologically daunting new train running -- on budget and in a remarkably short time.

Jet-propelled trains are still experimental, but the Metroliner evolved into Amtrak's Acela.

"At times we felt he was either a bloody ass or a genius. Neither are characteristic of a bureaucrat," one of Dr. Nelson's colleagues told Shapiro.

"But then," Shapiro observed, "how many trains have average bureaucrats built lately?"

Robert Alfred Nelson was born in East Bridgewater, Mass., and received a bachelor's degree in 1937 from Clark University in Worcester, Mass. After serving in Europe with the Army Signal Corps during World War II, he received a master's degree in business from Boston University in 1947 and his doctorate in economics from Clark in 1954.

(The preceding article was published by The Washington Post.)
March 23, 2009
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