Eleanor Acheson: A champion of diversity at Amtrak and beyond

By Bridget Dean, Associate Editor

The League of Railway Women has selected Amtrak’s Eleanor “Eldie” Acheson as the 2024 Railway Woman of the Year.

Acheson received the award during the 2025 National Railroad Construction and Maintenance Association Conference and NRC-REMSA Exhibition that was held Jan. 5-6 in Marco Island, Florida.

Co-sponsored by Progressive Railroading, the award annually honors a woman in the railroad industry who instills a culture of continuous improvement in her workplace and fosters personal and professional growth in others.

“LRW’s Woman of the Year Advisory Committee was impressed by Eldie’s unwavering commitment to creating pathways of opportunity for women and other minorities across the Amtrak organization,” said LRW President Lisa Tackach in a statement. “She has championed diversity in our industry, as well as accessibility for Amtrak passengers throughout the system.”

Acheson served the public sector for many years, including her 18-year career at Amtrak. For most of that time she served as chief legal officer. She retired on Feb. 1.

“[I’m] just very humbled and gratified by it,” she says of the LRW award.

Acheson has a long history of advocating for equity and diversity, dating back to her undergraduate days at Wellesley College in Massachusetts, where she was a classmate of Hillary Rodham (now Clinton).

In her now well-known commencement address to the Wellesley Class of 1969, Rodham called out Acheson for spearheading the effort to convince the college administration to allow a student to speak at graduation. Rodham was that speaker.

An empowering career

Acheson’s passion for equitable public policy led her to a career in law. After graduating from Wellesley, she spent a year working on public policy at the Urban Institute, where she witnessed successful female lawyers at work. The experience affirmed Acheson’s decision to attend law school, and she graduated in 1973 with a law degree from George Washington University.

Her first job right out of law school was immediately impactful: She served as a law clerk for Edward Gignoux, a U.S. district judge in Maine. Her work for Gignoux included several high-profile cases, including the retrials of the Chicago Seven, the anti-war activists who were arrested during protests at the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago. The Chicago Seven’s charges were eventually retried and mostly dropped under Gignoux after an appeals court found significant errors in the former judge’s rulings.

Following her clerkship, Acheson returned to her hometown of Boston to accept an associate position at Ropes & Gray. At the time, she was the first woman in the litigation group, and later the first woman to become a partner in the litigation group.

She joined the firm during a pivotal period of internal growth and diversification; clients were beginning to seek representation from companies that valued diversity and had equitable pay and fair policies on maternity leave.

Her two-decade career at the firm covered personal injury defense, employment law, environmental liability defense and permit acquisitions for nuclear plants.

On her own time, Acheson volunteered for political campaigns, including fundraising for the 1992 Clinton-Gore presidential campaign.

“I thought it would be interesting, and I could make the time to work in Massachusetts for Bill Clinton,” Acheson says.

She had already met Bill Clinton through their political connections and through Hillary. As president, Clinton appointed Acheson assistant attorney general for the U.S. Justice Department’s Office of Policy Development (now the Office of Legal Policy). She remained with the Clinton administration through both terms. After January 2001, she moved back to private practice and political campaign volunteerism.

In 2005, the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force tapped Acheson to launch a lobbying program. After doing that and setting up and staffing the grassroots organization’s public policy group, she heard about an opening as chief legal officer at Amtrak. She applied and got the job, starting in 2007.

Acheson led Amtrak’s legal department and served as the railroad’s corporate secretary. Later, she also assumed additional responsibilities as ethics officer. She ensured that the legal team was meeting the moment as corporate priorities shifted depending on Congress’ support of Amtrak, she says.

One of her first priorities at Amtrak was to work with its board to increase the pay of what she soon learned were the legal department’s underpaid legal staff. She also worked to increase the staff’s rank.

The department already employed a diverse group when she got there, but she expanded that diversity even more by bringing in people from different branches of law and career experiences.

The $1.3 billion in capital funds appropriated to Amtrak from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 greatly boosted hiring efforts; Amtrak was able to hire 14 lawyers in less than two years. She cites her work in expanding the legal team as one of her proudest accomplishments at the railroad.

Acheson also was pivotal in developing the department’s diversity committee. Among its tasks and accomplishments was to ensure Amtrak’s outside counsel valued diversity and followed equitable pay practices.

Time to retire

Acheson recently retired from Amtrak. People get hooked on working there and supporting its priorities, such as expanding rail service to communities that don’t have it or helping to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by rail, Acheson says.

“The programs are really important, and they’re great particularly for the American people,” she says.

Acheson felt passionate about her work at Amtrak. Still, she felt it was time to retire. On Oct. 1, 2024, she stepped down from her responsibilities as chief legal officer and general counsel, but continued serving as corporate secretary and ethics officer until Feb. 1 of this year, the 18th anniversary of her hiring at Amtrak.

The LRW learned of her retirement after selecting her to receive the 2024 Railway Woman of the Year award, LRW officials said. They added they were honored to have Acheson represent LRW as she closed out a successful career.

As for what’s next, Acheson says she’s looking forward to moving with her spouse from their Washington, D.C., apartment to their residence on Cape Cod, Massachusetts.