Anthony J. Bottalico spent forty years on the railroad and two decades leading the Metro-North union local that took on entrenched corruption from inside and won. As General Chairman, he negotiated the 1995 contract that pulled his members back from a strike that would have stripped them of federal protections, helped found the Association of Commuter Rail Employees (ACRE) in 2000, an independent union uniting conductors and engineers that had spent generations fighting each other, and built a c