Knueppel is known as a straight talker who was frequently willing to be the face of the agency in the aftermath of service disruptions, as he was this month when severe weather left railroad and trolley service in chaos. As a civil engineer, Knueppel was willing to dig into the minutiae of transit operations. Interviews with him at times included frequent references to a whiteboard in one of SEPTA’s conference rooms, where he would scrawl plans and procedural explanations in detail.