Extreme heat coupled with overburdened infrastructure, malfunctions and mechanical problems on Amtrak and New Jersey Transit brought agony and massive delays to tens of thousands of commuters across the Northeast this week.
Rail service between New Jersey and New York’s Penn Station was suspended on Thursday before the evening commute and again on Friday morning, with New Jersey traffic citation “AMTRAK Overhead Wire Problems.”
While the cause of the disruptions is still being investigated, they occurred during some of the hottest days of the year so far, prolonging daily commutes amid an early summer heat wave.
“Unfortunately, a unique combination of events recently caused major delays in the New York area, affecting travel along a significant section of the Northeast Corridor,” Amtrak President Roger Harris said in a statement Friday.
Harris added that on Thursday, a circuit breaker that powers the trains “suffered a catastrophic failure on one of the hottest days of the year and a serious wildfire also came close to our tracks.”
He said Amtrak is also working with New Jersey Transit “to understand and resolve recent outages associated with NJT trains operating on Amtrak’s Northeast Corridor infrastructure, which appears unique to the equipment and area.”
Amtrak and New Jersey Transit trains share a century-old tunnel that connects New York and New Jersey. It is the only passenger rail link between Manhattan and the rest of the Northeast Corridor, which runs from Washington, D.C. to Boston.
Extreme thermal stress infrastructure
While no single cause has been identified for this week’s traffic disruptions, rail experts have noted that the extreme heat has the potential to overwhelm infrastructure.
Many trains use a long welded piece of metal called “continuous welding” to work, and when the temperature rises, it expands, creating tension and forcing the track to bend, said Curtis Morgan, head of the freight and commerce division and senior researcher. . scientist at the Texas A&M Transportation Institute.
“It could cause a derailment,” he said. “Due to the additional stress on the tracks, trains are forced to run at a slower speed.”
This week, Amtrak warned that high temperatures across the region forced some trains to run at slower speeds, resulting in hour-long delays.
Most Amtrak trains run between 120 and 150 mph, but when temperatures are close to triple digits, trains slow down to between 50 and 100 mph, he said. Gerhard Williams, executive vice president of service delivery and operations at Amtrakadding that extreme heat played a small role in train disruptions this week.
New York City is under a heat warning until Sunday night, with the heat index at times reaching close to triple digits, according to the National Weather Service.
Clinton J. Andrews, director of the Center for Urban Policy Research at Rutgers University and an expert on engineering, urban planning and climate change mitigation, said the summer months will increase pressure on rail infrastructure.
“Summer heat, like any extreme weather, tests our infrastructure systems as well as our bodies. In the case of mass transit, especially fixed rail transit, there are specific concerns,” Andrews said. “The first is that both the rails, which are made of steel, and the catenary wires, which supply power to electric trains, tend to expand during a heat wave.”
Most of this week’s delays and cancellations in the New York metropolitan area were caused by power and overhead wire problems, a faulty circuit breaker and a disabled train at Penn Station, transit officials said.
Mona Hemmati, a postdoctoral researcher at Columbia University specializing in climate physics, said the public can expect future mass transit delays and cancellations based on extreme weather conditions caused by climate change.
“It is important to understand that high temperatures increase the risk of derailment. You have to consider the impact of high temperatures on steel, catenary wires and so on,” she said, referring to the wires that power electric trains.
“We are seeing more heat waves due to climate change, rising temperatures and warming of the atmosphere. We should anticipate more prolonged periods of extreme heat,” he added.
New Jersey Transit did not comment on weather-related delays, but said in a statement Friday that the impact its service had on customers this week was “unacceptable.”
“We are just as frustrated as our customers,” he said.
New Jersey Transit operates 700 trains every weekday over hundreds of miles between Philadelphia and New Haven, Connecticut, but the vast majority of outages have occurred between New Jersey and New York.
Frustrated travelers
Many passengers who have had difficulties this week said they hope the situation will improve soon.
“I used NJT three times this week and every time I got screwed. I wrote a play and was almost two hours late for rehearsal on Tuesday,” said Roma Torre, a New Jersey resident and former anchor for the local news channel NY1, who regularly uses the New Jersey transit system. “The problem is poor service, although I fully understand that we have infrastructure problems.”
Tina Palazzo, a lawyer who commutes to Manhattan on New Jersey Transit, said: “I’ve had problems every day this week. It took me over three hours to get home yesterday, when I normally have an hour commute.”
Palazzo, of Scotch Plains, New Jersey, said he took Tuesday off work to make sure he didn’t miss his son’s high school graduation.
“It’s horrible and communication is non-existent,” she said of her commute this week.
This story originally appeared on NBCNews.com read the full story
