Amtrak Northeast Corridor Service Resumes Following Massive Meltdown

The view from an Amtrak Northeast Regional train
Amtrak resumed service along the Northeast Corridor late Thursday.
“Full scheduled service is in effect,” an Amtrak spokesman finally was able to say.
New Jersey Transit, which operates the largest statewide public transit system in the country, also was able to resume service between New York and New Jersey.
Service along the 427-mile (687-kilometer) Northeast Corridor, also known as the I-95 corridor, which links Boston to New York City to Philadelphia to Washington, D.C., had largely come to a halt.
On Wednesday at 5:05 p.m. local time, just as the evening rush hour was starting to pick up steam, an overhead wire that transmits traffic signals fell and struck a cable that provides electrical power to trains on Amtrak’s tracks in Kearny, New Jersey, just a few miles west of New York City. The resulting “blowout” caused train traffic to come to a halt not only for Amtrak but also for New Jersey Transit trains in both directions between Pennsylvania Station in Manhattan and Newark.
With no trains moving into or out of New York across the Hudson River, the disruption rippled up and down the line, north to Boston and south to Philadelphia and beyond. It left thousands of extremely unhappy passengers standing along the tracks of stations throughout the region, on what was the eve to the start of a major holiday weekend.
It hadn’t been a good week for train travel in the region.
On Tuesday, downed wires in a tunnel under the Hudson River led to delays of up to 60 minutes in and out of Pennsylvania Station and, just to make matters worse, on Thursday, officials warned of delays as long as an hour because of signal problems at Amtrak’s Dock Bridge in Newark.
Amtrak is responsible for the maintenance of much of the tracks used by other railroads including New Jersey Transit in the corridor and, thanks to new funding from the Biden administration, it’s been making significant improvements along the entire corridor. However, that corridor narrows to just two tracks between Newark and Manhattan so even the smallest ripple can lead to a tsunami wave of delays.
The good news is that construction has begun on the early stages of a massive  $30 billion project known as Gateway. Once completed, the Gateway would eliminate this bottleneck and add a new two-track tunnel under the Hudson River. But the Gateway project is expected to take at least a decade to complete.
(Photo: Accura Media Group)