A power outage shut down all train service along the Northeast Corridor between Philadelphia and New Haven, Conn., for more than three hours Thursday afternoon, causing significant delays in and out of the nation’s busiest hub for a fourth times in the last two months.
Amtrak said that, on one of the hottest days of the year, the power outage forced it to temporarily suspend all service along that 150-mile stretch of track, which runs through Pennsylvania Station in Manhattan, around 2:10 p.m. repairs. , service was partially restored around 5:30 p.m
But by then, the outage had already rippled along the Eastern Seaboard, causing trains to be halted and canceled as far away as Boston and Harrisburg, Pa. Delays were expected to continue into the night.
Gery Williams, an Amtrak executive vice president, said the problem stemmed from “a malfunctioning circuit breaker” in New Jersey, west of the rail tunnels under the Hudson River, which cut power to the overhead wires that trains enter and exit. of tunnels. That segment of the corridor has only two tracks and is the main bottleneck for rail travel in the Northeast. Any interruption in that narrow passage could cause headaches for thousands of commuters.
Mr. Williams said the electrical problem was unrelated to a brush fire in Secaucus, N.J., Thursday afternoon that was burning near train tracks and the New Jersey Turnpike. The fire was extinguished on Thursday evening.
One of Amtrak’s Acela trains was already more than an hour late when it got stuck east of Newark without air conditioning, Mr. Williams added. Those passengers were transferred to other trains, he said. Another Amtrak train was stranded in Queens, also without air conditioning. Amtrak sent a diesel engine to tow that train to Pennsylvania Station in Manhattan, he said.
Mr. Williams apologized to Amtrak and New Jersey Transit customers whose trains share the portion of Amtrak’s Northeast Corridor between New York City and Trenton, NJ.
He said he met Thursday with New Jersey Transit officials to outline plans to improve rail infrastructure “so our customers don’t have to endure this horrible experience again.” He said there had been “many” significant outages recently.
New Jersey Transit diverted trains to Penn Station at the Hoboken terminal and accepted train tickets on its buses during the hours it was out of service. The PATH train between Manhattan and New Jersey also honored rail tickets.
Jim Casey, 59, had been waiting at the station for almost three hours on Thursday night. The delays, he said, had put a damper on his evening plan to go to the beach.
“Right now there’s a tunnel in and a tunnel out,” said Mr. Casey, who commutes to Manhattan from Bucks County, Pa. “If something goes wrong in the tunnels, we’re stuck.”
Asked if he thought the situation would improve in the future, Mr Casey did not hesitate. He wasn’t optimistic “this problem will ever go away,” he said.
He said he was late to work on Tuesday because of the delays and then waited two hours after work the same day to go home.
Across the river at Newark Penn Station, Ilana Nathan was trying to travel from Long Island to her home in Cherry Hill, N.J. Her train to Penn Station in Manhattan was canceled, but she was able to catch a replacement. Then it was canceled too, but only after she sat in it for 90 minutes (no air conditioning.)
A station official advised her to take a PATH train to Newark, she paid high prices for an Uber to the World Trade Center station. When she arrived in Newark, she found all the trains cancelled. By then, she had been in transit for six hours.
“I’m hot, I’m fired up,” Ms Nathan, 29, said. “I just want to go home.”
The outage was at least the fourth in the past two months to cause long delays for commuters in the metropolitan area.
On Tuesday morning, New Jersey Transit service to and from New York’s Penn Station was suspended for about an hour and all Amtrak trains running through the station were delayed due to overhead wire problems and a disabled passenger train confined to the tracks, train officials said.
The outage ruined the morning commute for thousands of New Jersey residents as delays spread along various rail lines in the state.
The problems Tuesday followed major rush-hour delays at Penn Station earlier this month caused by an inspection of Amtrak-owned tracks. Service was significantly delayed for over an hour.
Service was also disrupted in May when an overhead wire used for traffic signals fell and hit a cable in Kearny, NJ, that provides electricity to trains on Amtrak’s Northeast Corridor. Amtrak and New Jersey Transit trains were grounded in both directions between Penn Station and Newark, and delays stretched to more than four hours.
Maia Coleman AND Nate Schweber contributed to the reporting.