Failures on aging Northeast rail system spur delays, worries

For train passengers traveling this summer between Philadelphia and New York City, frequent delays have highlighted the fragile condition of the antiquated equipment on the nation's busiest rail corridor.

Power failures, a transformer fire, and last week's derailments in New York have stranded thousands of riders and demonstrated the problems with old power lines, congested tunnels, and deferred maintenance.

"The common perception is that the heyday of the railroads was in the 1940s. But really, for commuters, it's now," said Matthew Mitchell of the Delaware Valley Association of Rail Passengers, who was delayed 40 minutes this week on a New York-bound train.

"Ridership records are regularly broken. And that's why the previous administration in New Jersey was proceeding with new tunnels under the Hudson and related projects to accommodate the current demand, give us some breathing room, and be ready for future decades of growth," Mitchell said.

Gov. Christie canceled the $8.7 billion tunnel project last year, citing a likelihood of cost overruns and possible burden on state taxpayers.

More than 2,000 trains - including those run by Amtrak, NJ Transit, SEPTA, and other transit agencies - operate daily on the 457-mile Northeast Corridor between Washington and Boston.

Last week was especially frustrating for travelers on the corridor.

A switch failure Friday was the latest in a series of disruptions that began Tuesday when two cars of a Trenton-bound NJ Transit train derailed while leaving Manhattan's Penn Station.

Riders faced more delays Thursday after an Amtrak train slipped off the rails at a storage yard in Queens, forcing trains to be rerouted on their way to Penn Station.

"While the incidents were minor in nature, they had major impacts on our customers," said NJ Transit spokeswoman Penny Bassett Hackett. "Our customers were impacted during four peak periods."

At 92 percent, on-time performance on the Northeast Corridor is the lowest among NJ Transit's eight rail lines. Amtrak's on-time performance on the corridor is 79 percent.

Amtrak owns most of the 120-year-old rail corridor, including the segment between Philadelphia and New York. The national passenger railroad inherited aging bridges, tunnels, power lines, and signal systems from the Penn Central when it acquired the corridor in 1976.

With limited funds from Congress over the decades, Amtrak has been unable to replace much of the infrastructure. It now has more than $5.7 billion in deferred "state of good repair" projects on the corridor.

NJ Transit officials are especially keen to see improvements in the undependable power grid for the corridor.

"The [overhead] catenary wires and the supporting power substations - we're in agreement with Amtrak that there needs to be a focus on that," Bassett Hackett said.

And the two rail tunnels under the Hudson, opened in 1910, are unable to accommodate more trains to Penn Station, where train traffic has grown 89 percent since 1976.

"Additional tunnels would have been useful" in coping with the NJ Transit derailment in Penn Station that delayed trains Tuesday and Wednesday, said Amtrak spokesman Steve Kulm.

But the Access to the Region's Core (ARC) tunnel project killed last year by Christie would have been of little help, because its tunnels would not have gone to Penn Station. They were to end at a separate terminal beneath Penn Station.

Amtrak now proposes two new tunnels to connect to an expanded Penn Station as part of its $13.5 billion Gateway Project, which also would replace bridges and expand capacity between Newark, N.J., and Manhattan.

That project would be crucial to Amtrak's bigger plans for a true high-speed Northeast Corridor, with 220 m.p.h. trains that could travel between Philadelphia and New York in 38 minutes.

The proposed high-speed system would cost about $117 billion and take up to 30 years to complete, according to Amtrak. However, Congress has not approved funding for the Gateway Project or the high-speed corridor.

Even money authorized for smaller improvements is in jeopardy.

A $450 million grant awarded in May to upgrade power and signals on the Philadelphia-New York stretch of the corridor could be revoked under a proposal by U.S. Rep. Rodney Frelinghuysen (R., N.J.).

Under Frelinghuysen's amendment to a bill approved in June by the House Appropriations Committee, that money would go for flood relief in the Midwest instead.

Frelinghuysen's amendment would take away all "unobligated" money designated for high-speed rail. Amtrak is trying to complete the contractual work with federal Department of Transportation officials to obligate the money in time to avoid losing it.

"Amtrak has been starved of capital by the U.S. government. That's the major problem," said Philip G. Craig of the New Jersey Association of Rail Passengers. "The infrastructure has to be renewed, and that takes money."

New Jersey Sierra Club director Jeff Tittel said, "This country has spent trillions of dollars subsidizing the highway system and has spent pennies by comparison on rail."

Improvements such as the Hudson tunnels also have been delayed by the multitude of rail operators involved in planning, Tittel said.

"Too many agencies want to have their own sets of choo-choos," he said.

Money - lots of it - will be required to fix the corridor or work around it, said Mitchell, of the Philadelphia-area passengers' organization.

"It's billions of dollars that need to be spent on the rail system to keep it reliable," he said. "Or billions of dollars in economic losses from service disruptions, or billions of dollars to double-deck highways, pave over more of the Northeast, and build fantastically expensive bridges and tunnels for cars and trucks."