Officials still don’t know what broke America’s busiest rail corridor

NEW YORK — Commuters into New York City got pummeled by train delays and cancellations this summer, and nobody knows how to stop it from happening again. Even if they did, resuscitating the vital rail arterial into Manhattan could take years and untold amounts of money.

Regulators and elected officials — spurred on by furious constituents — are ramping up pressure on Amtrak and New Jersey Transit, which operate the trains, to figure out what ails the busiest stretch of passenger railway in the country.

But officials at the agencies say even if they could pinpoint a precise cause — the answer is lurking in some mishmash of century-old tracks, aging trains, extreme heat and high demand — fixing it will be an incredibly complex puzzle with no easy solutions and enormous price tags.

That’s the bottom line of a new report from Amtrak and New Jersey Transit scrutinizing what waylaid commuters earlier this summer, when riders faced dizzying delays on the route carrying tens of thousands of daily passengers in and out of America’s economic powerhouse.

At the time, officials blamed problems on high temperatures . Now, even the head of Amtrak says that’s not the whole picture.

“It can’t be only the heat,” Amtrak CEO Stephen Gardner said in an interview.

What exactly it is continues to elude them, Gardner acknowledged.

“Everyone’s looking for a simple solution,” he said. “It’s not simple. … We have lots of engineers — they’ve spent their whole lives doing this work and most of them on this exact railroad, both at NJT and at Amtrak.”

This summer saw the worst month of performance on New Jersey Transit, which operates along tracks owned by Amtrak, since Democratic New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy took office in 2018 — and commuters’ mood wasn’t improved much by a 15 percent fare hike that took effect July 1.

It’s created a political problem for Murphy, who has pledged to “fix” the state’s ailing mass transit system — and whose administration has placed much of the blame on Amtrak for the hellish summer commute.

New Jersey Transit officials now report two sets of numbers showing how its trains perform — a set New Jersey officials say include Amtrak-related delays and a set without. Not surprisingly, by taking out the problems New Jersey blames on Amtrak, New Jersey Transit looks pretty good — even in June, when a quarter of its trains on the busy route were late or canceled.

Amtrak, in turn, has questioned if its tracks and New Jersey Transit’s trains are compatible, Rep. Frank Pallone, a New Jersey Democrat who has been meeting regularly with Amtrak officials, said in an interview.

But now, it seems, the two railroads are on the same page — a point Gardner and New Jersey Transit CEO Kevin Corbett tried to drive home during a joint interview with POLITICO to talk about their work together.

Corbett said the problems that cropped up may be the result of “death from 1,000 cuts” because of aging infrastructure at both New Jersey Transit and Amtrak. Gardner also alluded to decades of federal underfunding of Amtrak. And both blamed predecessors for failing to keep the systems in good shape.

Corbett mentioned former Republican New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, whose administration is blamed for neglecting mass transit over two terms — and actively undermining train travel by killing a project to build new tracks between New Jersey and New York.

Cash flow

Some lawmakers have pointed to the enormous amounts of money the Biden administration has handed out in his signature climate and infrastructure laws, including $6 billion in the 2021 infrastructure law intended for Amtrak to maintain a “state of good repair,” along with over $20 billion for other infrastructure projects.

New Jersey’s congressional delegation, including Pallone and fellow Democratic Rep. Josh Gottheimer, is urging the two railroads to work together and for Amtrak to spend the billions of dollars in federal money at its disposal from the infrastructure law.

But much of that money was meant for Amtrak to spend on its own equipment and facilities — not ones it shares with other railroads.

In a statement, the White House noted that the Biden administration has made the largest investment in passenger rail since Amtrak was created 50 years ago.

“The White House is working closely with DOT and Amtrak to invest billions in the Northeast Corridor to improve performance and reduce delays for the 800,000 passengers who depend on this corridor every day,” said White House spokesperson Robyn Patterson.

Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg met last week with Amtrak leaders about issues in the Northeast Corridor and asked for regular updates, according to the Department of Transportation.

Much of the larger pot is set aside for major upgrades, like new train tunnels under the Hudson River to connect New York and New Jersey, a new version of the project Christie killed over a decade ago.

By the time some of those big projects, known collectively as Gateway, are finished, NJ Transit and Amtrak will have basically created an entirely new stretch of railway between New York City’s Penn Station and Newark, New Jersey.

But the total need for the corridor is about $135 billion over 15 years — far more than is on the table now.

Power problems

Much of the two railroads’ focus in solving the problems has been on key parts of their systems that must interact almost flawlessly for trains to run on time. Surprisingly, this issue isn’t the tracks below the trains but the power lines overhead.

Amtrak power lines, known as catenaries, run along tracks to provide power to trains. New Jersey Transit trains have rooftop poles, known as pantographs, that draw power from those lines.

If something goes wrong, the poles can snag and even pull down the overhead lines. Not only does the train itself lose power but the downed lines mean power can be taken out across multiple tracks, possibly delaying tens of thousands of passengers all at once.

Garner said their investigation is looking at seven incidents involving the wires and poles over this summer. He called it a “needle in a haystack,” since some 24,000 trains used the same system during that period.

But each incident caused a spillover effect that brought back recollections of 2017, the so-called “summer of hell” for commuters in and around New York City.

Corbett said the comparison isn’t quite right because problems for the railroads that year centered around New York’s Penn Station. This year’s problems are cropping up somewhere along over 200 miles of railway.

In the report covering their work together from July through early August, Amtrak and New Jersey Transit said they have “increased examination, inspection, maintenance, and improvement activities” along the Northeast Corridor.

They’ve inspected 153 miles of the 240 miles of Amtrak track New Jersey Transit shares between Trenton and New York City.

Gardner said they have not been able to find a systemic problem with either the catenaries or the pantographs, though there have been some pieces of the latter breaking, perhaps because of high heat.

“So there’s a bit of a mystery here where we don’t have a clear, identified issue with the catenary, we don’t have a clear, identified issue with the pantograph,” Gardner said.