December 1, 2004
Speaker Biographies
Joseph Vranich has been involved with railroad passenger issues for more than thirty years, including efforts from 1970 through 1973 to create and expand Amtrak. He later became a public affairs spokesman for Amtrak. Between 1989 and 1995, he was vice president for public affairs and president of the High Speed Rail Association. The association granted him its highest honor, the Distinguished Service Award. Mr. Vranich was appointed by Congress to the Amtrak Reform Council, where he served from February 1998 to July 2000. He is the author of two previous books about passenger rail service and has spoken about rail service at forums throughout the United States and in Europe and Japan.
Wendell Cox is a principal of Wendell Cox Consultancy in St. Louis, an international public policy, demographics and transport firm. He serves as a visiting professor at the Conservatoire National des Arts et Metiers in Paris, a French national university. He was appointed to the Amtrak Reform Council by Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich and played a major role in fashioning the council's final recommendations. Mayor Tom Bradley appointed him to the Los Angeles County Transportation Commission in 1977, which oversaw public transit and highways in the nation's largest county. He was the only member of the commission who was not also an elected official.
Peter R. B. Armstrong started his career in the hospitality industry as doorman at the Hotel Vancouver, where he and a bellman opened their own business, Spotlight Tours. In time, he and fellow partners purchased Trailways of British Columbia, which later won the bid for Gray Line in the province's first privatization, and he became president. Next, he assembled the team that successfully bid in the privatization of the Rocky Mountaineer train operated by Via Rail (Canada’s equivalent to Amtrak) and made it a success without government subsidy. He received the Canadian Venture Capital Association’s Entrepreneur of the Year Award, Ernst & Young’s Entrepreneur of the Year Award for Tourism and Hospitality, and the Queen's Golden Jubilee Medal for contribution to Canadian communities. He has also been inducted into the Canadian Railway Hall of Fame. He sits on the boards of many tourism organizations.
James K. Glassman is a resident fellow at AEI. In addition, he is host and cofounder of TechCentralStation.com, a for-profit website started in February 2000, which concentrates on matters of technology and public policy. In September 2004, he launched a new organization, Investors Action, for which he serves as chairman. Mr. Glassman also writes a weekly op-ed column on economic and political topics for the Scripps Howard News Service, which appears in dozens of newspapers. Starting in November 2004, he will be writing a monthly column on investing for Kiplinger's Personal Finance. Between July 1993 and July 2004, he wrote an internationally syndicated weekly column on investing for the Washington Post. His most recent book, The Secret Code of the Superior Investor (Crown Books) was named one of the top-ten investing books of 2002 by Barrons. From 1987 to 1993, he was editor and part-owner of Roll Call. Before that, he had a long career in magazine publishing as president of The Atlantic Monthly, executive vice president of U.S. News & World Report, and publisher of The New Republic. He has also hosted Capital Gang Sunday on CNN and TechnoPolitics on PBS. His articles have been published in the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Forbes, Reader's Digest, and other publications.
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