STB Chairman Daniel R. Elliott has chosen M. Reamy Ancarrow to be his attorney-adviser effective Nov. 9, according to agency staff. She takes the second policy job in the chairman's office, which has been open since Elliott was sworn in Aug. 13.

She will work for Elliott along with Chief of Staff Raymond A. Atkins, who had been the STB's associate general counsel before he joined Elliott's office in August and who earlier worked for a law firm representing Union Pacific Railroad.

Elliott himself had been associate general counsel for the largest rail labor group, the United Transportation Union, which represents train conductors, when President Obama last summer nominated him to head the rail industry's economic regulatory agency.

An STB staff member said Atkins as the chairman's chief of staff is both Elliott's top aide and has agency-wide administrative duties. Ancarrow's attorney-adviser role, that staffer said, is to help Atkins and Elliott with the workload.

In seeking the job she had listed among her references shipper attorneys Michael McBride and Robert Szabo of the Van Ness Feldman firm in Washington, D.C. Szabo is also executive director of the rail customers lobby group Consumers United for Rail Equity.

Ancarrow was a former partner at LeBoeuf, Lamb, Greene & MacRae (now Dewey & LeBoeuf) from 1985 to 1993, and sometimes represented rail shipper companies. The STB said she participated in administrative trials, hearings and rulemakings before the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, Interstate Commerce Commission, Department of Transportation, Environmental Protection Agency and state regulatory agencies.

Atkins had been in the STB's general counsel office since 2003, and handled major rate cases in an era when the board slapped some railroads with large penalties but was still criticized by shipper groups for not doing more to promote rail competition.

He earlier worked three years in the Washington firm Covington & Burling, in its anti-trust and transportation practices. Atkins also clerked for Judge Dolores K. Sloviter of the U.S. Court of Appeals, Third Circuit, and was an adjunct professor at George Mason University School of Law.

(The preceding article by John D. Boyd at jboyd@joc.com appeared on the Web site www.joc.com on October 30, 2009.)