Henry Posner, III

A lifetime railway activist, Mr. Posner held positions with Amtrak, The Official Railway Guide and the Chicago, Rock Island & Pacific Railroad during his college years. He entered full-time railway service at Conrail in 1977, serving the Operating, Marketing and Sales departments in Detroit, New York, and Philadelphia.

He serves as Chairman of RDC, which he founded in 1987 with his partner Bob Pietrandrea, who retired in 2022. He also serves as Chairman of Iowa Interstate Railroad; RDC-Deutschland; EuroRail; and family investment firm The Hawthorne Group.

He serves as President of the EBT Foundation, a nonprofit organization formed to restore and operate the East Broad Top Railroad; Iowa Interstate’s alternate director at the Association of American Railroads; Co-Chair of the Surface Transportation Board Passenger Rail Advisory Committee (PRAC); and a member of the Transportation Research Board’s Agriculture and Food Transport Subcommittee.

A graduate of Princeton University (BS-Civil Engineering), Mr. Posner also holds an MBA in Finance from the Wharton School. He teaches undergraduate courses on rail deregulation and privatization at Carnegie Mellon University’s, Pittsburgh and Qatar campuses, and has taught a graduate module at the Denver Transportation Institute. He has lectured and published extensively on railway matters and was a contributor to the book Railway Transformation, published in 2010 by Eurail Press under the auspices of the Community of European Railways.

He serves as a board member of the Independent School Chairpersons’ Association, and as an Emeritus Trustee and former President of the Winchester Thurston School.

His philanthropic activities include serving as the Chairman of the Posner Foundation, whose activities have ranged from support of the Jewish community in the Former Soviet Union to Operation Lifesaver. He was named among “75 People You Should Know” by TRAINS magazine for their 75th Anniversary; is the recipient of a Paul Harris Fellowship from Rotary International for his work in Guatemala; and is an occasional contributor to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette on regional affairs.

He writes haiku and speaks English, Spanish, French and Russian.

RDC’s history is profiled in the book Railroaders Without Borders by Prof. H. Roger Grant (Indiana University Press, 2015).