NYC subways melt down, stranding sweaty straphangers with delays amid 100-degree heat wave

Welcome to another Summer of Hell .

Nearly every MTA subway service line saw delays this week, leaving frustrated straphangers sweating as a punishing heat wave pushed temps above ground near 100 degrees — and into hellish extremes below.

“What’s the subway like?” said Reid Simmons, 44. “It’s hot. It’s really hot.

“It makes a difficult city way more difficult.”

The morning rush-hour on Wednesday was dogged by lingering problems on the A, E and F lines. By the afternoon’s rush hour, 18 service lines experienced delays or other disruptions throughout the day, sometimes several times.

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The combo of stifling heat and subway misery hit a crescendo during Tuesday’s afternoon rush-hour, as a third-rail power outage near Essex Street halted J and M line service, MTA officials said.

Further delays rippled out, with the A, B, D and F lines experiencing a dozen or more disruptions throughout Tuesday, according to MTA alerts.

Caroline, a 27-year-old New Yorker, told The Post she tried to make what would be normally be a very easy commute from the West Village to the East Village along the L train.

But, facing a 17-minute delay, her and her husband opted to call a cab instead of sweating out the wait. She said other straphangers did the same.

“It’s just so hot if you have to wait longer than three minutes in the tunnel it’s not worth it,” she said.

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New Jersey Transit officials chalked up similar delays to the heat — but MTA honcho Janno Lieber said the subway snarls had a different culprit: decaying century-old infrastructure.

“This is not heat-related,” Lieber said during an apologetic Wednesday news conference. “This is because the infrastructure is so damn old.”

Lieber said a 55-year transformer — which had a 25-year span of usefulness — failed at an Essex Street power station.

Crews cobbled together a fix, but Lieber warned 25% of similar MTA transformers are rated in poor or marginal condition.

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“This is what takes place when you underinvest in an essential infrastructure system that is 100 years old and getting older all the time,” he said.

MTA officials such as Lieber had hoped $15 billion from the now-paused congestion pricing would help the transit agency invest in modern infrastructure projects.

But he acknowledged that congestion pricing funds would have only fixed some of the MTA’s many failing systems.

Hot and tired straphangers filled benches to catch their breath in the steamy atmosphere in stations such as Times Square and Grand Central on Wednesday.

Even when trains ran on time, straphangers such as Christie — a 37-year-old Brooklynite who commutes into Manhattan — said they carried unpleasant memories of Tuesday’s nightmare.

“It was hot, super crowded. And it kept getting stuck,” she said about D line delays.

— Additional reporting by Haley Brown

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