Michelle D. was one of the thousands of NJ Transit commuters who had an hours-long, hellish journey home recently after wires fell on the tracks a few miles from New York Penn Station, halting trains along the nation’s busiest stretch of rail at the worst possible time — 5:05 p.m.
The Chatham resident, who commutes daily on the Morris & Essex line to her Manhattan job, waited an hour at New York Penn Station on May 22 before finding out all trains were canceled. She and hordes of others made their way to the nearest PATH station, where every train car was 10 to 20 people deep. So she had to wait for the next train.
Amid pushing and shoving, she eventually boarded another packed train out of Hoboken — after almost getting smacked in the face by another rider’s backpack — only to have it stop at the next station because of a medical emergency.
She was at the three-hour mark by then.
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Her 10-mile journey home ultimately took four hours.
Over the course of just three days, NJ Transit and Amtrak commuters endured a litany of hours-long, haphazard commutes because of equipment failures along three bridges or tunnels whose average age is 105 and overhead wires, or catenary, that predates the 1950s. Journeying on aging, deteriorated and long-neglected infrastructure to get to and from New York Penn Station has — yet again — become a predictably unpredictable odyssey. And the end isn’t near.
Michelle’s commute the morning before took three hours as trains were delayed and canceled because NJ Transit’s pantograph, the equipment atop the train that distributes power, became ensnared with the overhead wire.
That week’s commuting problems didn’t end there.
May 23, the day after the downed wires, was little better as customers dealt with residual delays and cancellations because train equipment was not where it needed to be. Crews were also short because they worked too many hours the day before and couldn’t work the next day. Before noon, there were new wire versus pantograph issues and signal problems cropped up at the 89-year-old Dock Bridge outside Newark Penn Station, causing new layers of delays and travel chaos.
And the night cap? During the evening rush hour, the 114-year-old Portal Bridge, which carries trains over the Hackensack River, had to open for marine traffic, causing more delays.
Déjà vu from ‘Summer of Hell’ circa 2017?
NJ Transit and Amtrak customers are trapped in this commuting purgatory for at least another 10 years as the decades-old assets on the notorious 10-mile stretch of rail between Newark Penn Station and New York Penn Station slowly get replaced, repaired and reinforced.
As the northeast endures an extreme heat wave this week, wire versus pantograph issues have already cropped up, forcing New York Penn Station to close during the morning rush Tuesday. Delays and commuting headaches were felt up and down the corridor all day, with an Amtrak train breaking down in Penn during the evening rush hour.
Michelle, a veteran commuter who has endured the far-reaching effects of the erratic Northeast Corridor for a decade, said the recent problems are reminiscent of 2017, when delays and cancellations snowballed in the first few months of the year. (She didn’t provide her last name because of her employer’s corporate media policy.)
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By the end of April that year, there were two minor derailments in New York Penn Station and Amtrak officials decided to accelerate more than three years of planned work into eight weeks, a period known as the “Summer of Hell” because it required cancellations and train diversions to other stations.
The problems unfolding today are not a direct comparison to 2017. Today’s issues are largely related to signals, wires and NJ Transit’s pantographs, while the major problems that led to the emergency work in 2017 were derailments due to track problems in New York Penn Station.
In the first four months of 2017, NJ Transit canceled 708 trains because of Amtrak-related issues, according to the agency — NJ Transit shares the use of Amtrak-owned rail routes on the busiest stretch of track in the state between Philadelphia and New York. In the first four months of this year, NJ Transit says 329 of its trains were canceled because of Amtrak.
The May 22 incident alone impacted 155 NJ Transit and 29 Amtrak trains over two days.
Michelle remembers 2017 being a long, painful summer as the repairs were completed, but said she would endure another weeks-long period of repairs — if it meant getting improved service faster.
“I would definitely prefer a defined repair period where customers know what to expect rather than the free-for-all we’re in,” she said. “Tell us, ‘These 6 weeks, we’re fixing X, Y, and Z,’ but then actually come through and fix things that improve service. Stick to the deadline. Keep the delays in the realm of reasonable. Let us plan accordingly.”
Preventing an Amtrak versus NJ Transit war
Amtrak and NJ Transit officials met earlier this month to discuss short- and long-term plans to prevent another May 22 problem from happening, but both agencies said a “Summer of Hell”-style work plan doesn’t make sense right now.
Kevin Corbett, president and CEO of NJ Transit, said they’re trying to take a “surgical approach versus a generic approach,” but admitted the agency is open to that as a last resort.
“I don’t think we’re looking at a wholesale thing at this point,” Corbett said. “But we need to look at weekends, canceling some trains, early trains or late trains” to give Amtrak a wider window “if they show the benefit of doing that and how much they can accelerate.”
Gery Williams, Amtrak’s executive vice president of service delivery and operations, said, “We’ve got a strong partnership, the teams have worked together after these incidents” since May 22 figuring out what has to be done “to prevent any further reoccurrences.”
The four-decade-old landlord-tenant relationship between Amtrak and NJ Transit can be tense. Meetings like the one earlier this month were frank, but productive, according to Corbett. Both sides tried to communicate to the other their biggest challenges and problems on the Northeast Corridor, including the May 22 incident — the cause of which Amtrak says it could not determine — and what solutions can be accommodated by both agencies.
They aim to avoid a repeat of 2017.
The relationship between Amtrak and NJ Transit soured when then-New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie began withholding NJ Transit’s payments to Amtrak and sought to recoup past payments. NJ Transit currently pays about $226 million in annual operating and capital costs to Amtrak for use of its tracks in New Jersey, plus stations and yards in Pennsylvania and New York that are also owned by Amtrak.
After weeks of negotiation, the Summer of Hell work plan was agreed to and Christie also insisted on better communication between Amtrak and NJ Transit. This included daily updates about the repair work and included NJ Transit in the new operations center where real-time service changes could be communicated to customers.
Christie also gave NJ Transit-impacted customers a break on fares during the work period by halving them, an estimated cost of $15 million to the state; today, NJ Transit customers are bracing for a 15% fare increase July 1.
Christie infamously canceled plans to build a new rail tunnel into Penn Station in 2010, a project that would have been completed by now and could have addressed some wire and signal problems worsening today.
Corbett often reminds people that New Jersey and Amtrak have ended the bitter war of the last administration.
But problems like the ones encountered May 22 dredge up the same bitter feelings from 2017, and Gov. Phil Murphy sent a sternly worded letter to Amtrak’s board Chair Anthony Coscia the day after the overhead wire problems to put those feelings on the public record.
“I refuse to accept these Amtrak infrastructure challenges as an inevitable part of operating integrated mass transit systems,” Murphy wrote. “Amtrak needs to make immediate short-term and long-term investments to address infrastructure vulnerabilities and updated emergency management plans to provide more robust alternative modes of transportation when equipment failure occurs.”
Amtrak has increased investments on repairs on the Northeast Corridor between Trenton and New York Penn Station. This year, Amtrak will spend 71% more on railroad track, catenary, bridges, signals, and other infrastructure on that stretch of track when compared to 2021.
Stephen Gardner, Amtrak’s CEO, responded to Murphy’s letter apologizing for the incidents that unfolded the week of May 20, though he noted they believe two of the five were Amtrak’s fault, while three were attributed to NJ Transit’s pantographs.
While the teams from both agencies are reviewing plans to accelerate catenary and signal system upgrades, Gardner said Amtrak needs firmer financial commitments from New Jersey to capitalize on hundreds of millions in federal grants for larger-scale projects to replace, modernize or support the aging infrastructure, including the Sawtooth and Dock bridges, a new Kearny substation and catenary upgrades.
Drilling down to root causes
Among the ideas that came out of the meeting between Amtrak and NJ Transit is a new working group. It will be headed by Amtrak’s Williams and Jim Sincaglia, NJ Transit’s senior vice president of rail, but Corbett said the most important thing is it will bring together the people underneath them, the ones who are “going to make a difference” to prevent and respond to the incidents that affect commuters.
This is in addition to weekly updates Amtrak provides NJ Transit on progress regarding routine upgrades and repairs, the result of another fiasco last July when three Amtrak wire incidents led to days of outages and more than 400 trains cancelled or delayed.
“We’re going to be outlining, with NJT, how to increase the level of maintenance, but also more importantly the programmatic work or basically the production work where we would actually replace wire and things like that,” Williams said. “Unfortunately, to really get the ability and the productivity to do that, you’ve got to have time on the railroad at night.”
This new group will help ensure more repair work can get done on the Northeast Corridor by bringing together the people who can work out four essential things: the most urgent problems in need of fixing; overnights or weekends when some trains may get canceled so more work can get done; ensuring there are enough people to complete the work; and identifying root causes of problems “and solve it without trying to nail anybody, but just to make sure it doesn’t happen again,” Corbett said.
Corbett hopes this group will be able to take project ideas to replace catenary or bury signal wires, which were expected to take place in at least five years, and accelerate them — or prioritize them over other projects — so they can reap benefits in the near-term.
“Dock Bridge is not a major cause of delays,” Corbett said as an example. “It’s much more important that they accelerate the catenary and signal projects than prioritizing a project like Dock Bridge — so that’s the kind of issues we’re working through.”
Having the manpower to take full advantage of planned outages has been a challenge for Amtrak. Though they’ve made strides in hiring, extensive training must take place before certain skilled workers can be on a high-voltage railroad job site, so those who are qualified end up on large-scale projects rather than routine outages for repairs.
NJ Transit is developing a pilot program to lend Amtrak some of their workforce to assist with some repairs during outages.
If Amtrak and NJ Transit can come to agreements on outages, manpower and prioritizing new projects, the final hurdle will be paying for it, which will lead to a different debate: money.
Should NJ Transit’s annual payments to Amtrak be used for what it considers to be state-of-good-repair work, like upgrading catenary and signals? Or, as Amtrak’s Gardner and Williams have said, will more money be needed from New Jersey because some of NJ Transit’s annual state-of-good-repair money is going to construction payments on Portal North Bridge?
Improving trickle-up communication
One critical area everyone agrees needs work is to improve communications to customers when unexpected outages occur.
For Amtrak, it’s getting information from the ground-level once a problem is identified and into the devices of customers on stalled trains or waiting on platforms.
“Until we get people at these locations and can verify what occurred and are actually starting to fix it, we don’t have a good feel for how long this is going to be,” Williams said. “We have to figure out how to communicate despite that and give our customers as much information as we can.”
NJ Transit is also often in the dark during incidents like what occurred on May 22. That delays agency officials from communicating to their customers about whether delayed trains get canceled, making plans for cross-honoring with PATH, preparing staff at Hoboken or Port Authority Bus Terminal for a deluge of customers, or setting up emergency bus service between stops.
Corbett said the working group will also try to develop a system so NJ Transit can send people out with Amtrak when an incident occurs so they can get information up the chain faster.
“We want to be in there with them at the incident so we can communicate out,” Corbett said. “We’re having further meetings about how to really drill that down so that it’s not just ad hoc response, but to be ahead of the curve, rather than us waiting and pressing them usually under a heated sense of urgency.”
Without information, Michelle said, tempers rise as crowds swell in overcrowded New York Penn Station or when frustrated commuters are racing one another to board packed buses and PATH trains.
“If they don’t improve communication, I’m genuinely concerned for the welfare of the public-facing NJ Transit employees that have to deal with the worst complainers and don’t get home for hours right along with us — especially when the fare hikes go into effect, people are going to be fuming,” she said.
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