Not long ago, I had a great interview with David Gunn, president of Amtrak. I liked him — he left me thinking that with him at the helm, we might be on our way to much better rail service, especially to our cities. He also prompted me to think about the dangers of the big idea, of having too much of “the vision thing,” as George Bush the Elder called it. Gunn’s line of thinking both troubled and excited me.

Gunn, who made his reputation fixing up the New York city subway in the 1980s, said that the generally sorry state of America’s national rail service was caused in part by both the critics and the fans’ obsession with big, conceptual ideas into which they sought to cram America’s railroad.

Critics sought to “privatize” Amtrak, to make it somehow pay for itself, (something no other form of transportation is obliged to do). To meet this goal, their allies in Congress set a goal that Amtrak pay its operating costs by 2002 — a goal it predictably tried and failed to meet. Meanwhile, fans, including me, pushed it to imitate countries like France and Spain, which had high-speed trains whizzing along at 200 mph. Why couldn’t we have such things too, we asked? Why should we be the technological laggards?

In an effort to meet the demands of both constituents, Amtrak invested billions in the attempt of at least somewhat high-speed rail in the Boston-New York-Washington corridor. This was the Acela service. In the end, it neither made Amtrak self sufficient, nor did it meet its goals of drastically cutting travel time. Trains do hit speeds of 150 mph, but due to various right of way problems and track problems, the average times of the trains are nothing close to that. It still often takes close to four hours to get to Boston from New York. Still, a lot of people take the trains daily and they have the lion’s share of the market in those corridors, more than the airlines.

But these twin obsessions with speed and profitability, Gunn complained, distracted Amtrak from the basics of running a railroad, which in relatively short time could substantially improve service at a lower cost. Gunn argued for the merits of focusing on things like replacing worn out track ties, installing new overhead electrical lines, fixing bridges, renovating rail cars, and other unsexy stuff. Most of these tasks did not rely on new, gee-whiz technology. After all, trains in the 1920s traveled well over 100 mph.

So Gunn is doing just that. Rather than trying to excite Congress and fans with big, sexy visions, he’s focusing on gradual improvements, what he has called “The state of good repair” capital maintenance program. If Congress obliges with just a bit more funding, we could have fast trains traveling at pretty high speeds — say up to 120 mph — along the West coast, parts of the Midwest and Texas, as well as train accustomed Northeast.

Meanwhile, Gunn’s philosophy of focusing on the basics — something he used to recharge the New York City subway, my sources in the city say, has prompted me to think about my own priorities. I’m an ideas guy. Here was a big idea about the dangers of big ideas. In a way, Gunn was repeating H.L. Mencken, who said, (and this is from memory), that to every complex problem there was a simple solution — and it was wrong. What if the path to success often lay not in grand, conceptual thinking, but in nitty-gritty, just-the-facts-mamm attention to the details? Could this lesson be applied to everything from train service to fighting a war in Iraq?

The edited version of my interview with Gunn is in the May issue of Planning magazine (article available only to APA members).