Tom Beaumont

During college breaks in the sixties, Tom toiled for the Great Northern Ry and the Northern Pacific RR at Seattle’s King Street Station as an information clerk and occasionally a baggage handler and gateman. Some of his studies at the University of Oregon sensitized him to the need for quality rail service. On a school trip to Japan, he witnessed the building of the bullet train. He has travelled extensively by train all over the world. He has talked with a great variety of everyday riders, so he sees things from the average passengers’ perspective, an important angle in a group rich in rail expertise. He was a charter member of the Amtrak Customer Advisory Committee (now disbanded). For 30 years, he was a professor and psychiatric social worker at the University of Minnesota. He worked 20 years thereafter in the hospitality department of the Hilton Minneapolis.