Traveling Outside of Time
A voluble and animated man in his early 50s, Rosenwald looks a little like Gene Wilder, with his now-thinning but once-wild curly hair, his mischievous grin and his boyish high energy. He is a man with a direct gaze, a ready laugh, and lots and lots of ideas.
Sitting in his L.A. office at Amtrak West in 1995, Rosenwald had a vision of what train travel could be, a vision based on childhood memories of riding the great American passenger trains of the 1950s, the Santa Fe SuperChief and El Capitan, from his home in Chicago to visit his grandparents in Albuquerque. Train travel, he reasoned – he remembered — was more than a way to get from point A to point B. A train trip should be a wonderful, memorable experience, the kind of experience you told others about, the kind of experience you wanted to repeat. The kind of experience he had as an eight-year-old.
Rosenwald was in the right place at the right time. He was in charge of a spectacularly beautiful route that served four great cities, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Portland and Seattle. And he had a boss, Gil Mallery, then-president of Amtrak West, who said those three little words one rarely hears from bosses, especially bosses in phlegmatic government agencies: Go for it.