People are under a lot of misconceptions about the purpose of a board of directors. For one thing, it's purpose is not to micromanage Management and force them to restore daily long-distance trains, and bring back the Sightseer lounges and more capacity on the Texas Eagle and Capitol Limited. Or force the Amtrak CEO to eliminate Flex dining and have cooked to order food on all the trains. Or even lower sleeping car fares. Their oversight, such as it is, is done at a much higher level. So anyone that thinks that a new board will usher in some sort of golden age of long-distance rail travel is living in fantasyland. At a high level view, the whole point of government financial support for passenger rail is to get cars of the road. The vast majority of cars and miles driven in this country are in large urban areas. Thus, it is obvious that the main focus of government support for passenger rail is for regional service in metropolitan areas and intercity corridors linking such metropolitan areas. Long distance service, one or two trains a day serving mostly sparsely populated areas are clearly a secondary interest, and they are mainly maintained as part of a political deal to gain support from Federal Representatives and Senators representing these sparsely populated areas. That doesn't mean that these long-distance trains don't have real benefits, it's just that these benefits are at a secondary level to the main mission of Federal government support of passenger rail -- getting as many cars off the road as possible.
Looking from a high level, I think that Amtrak's major challenges are ensuring safely and reliable on-time performance, establishing schedules and frequencies that make train travel a reasonable and attractive alternative to driving, and a good state of repair for both the rolling stick and the Amtrak-owned infrastructure. Plus they need to be able to kick butt of the host railroads in order to ensure a lot of the list above. The level of on-board service, while it has some importance, is pretty far down on the list and certainly not worth expending funds that could be used to make the trains run safely and reliably on attractive schedules.
Go to the Web and take a look the board of directors of any large corporation. You may find a few subject matter experts on the board, but I would say that most of them are financiers of some sort or another. That makes sense, because corporations in a capitalist economy require capital, and it's a smart idea to have people at a high level who have access to that capital. A government-owned company like Amtrak is in a different situation. They need people on the board who can interact with the political echelon to ensure that the company gets the government support it needs. Not only Federal financial support, but also from state governments. Now they can't have 50 board members, one from each state, but they can have people who are familiar with politics at both the state and local levels, and people who know and have good personal relations with the elected officials who control government purse-strings and set other policies relevant to the operation of Amtrak. I suspect that, whatever people may think of Mr. Gardner and Mr. Cosica, they have those qualities in abundance.
Finally, I'm not sure why people believe that if a board member happens to come from a state through which the NEC passes, that their only interest about Amtrak is going to be "taking care" of the NEC at the expense of all of the other service Amtrak provides. I realize that in our federal constitutional system, our national legislators are extremely parochial, but that's not necessarily true of all of the types of distinguished people who are appointed to boards of directors. If there's evidence that some of these people are going to be biased in a way you don't like, than point out that evidence, not the irrelevant fact of where they happen to live.
