Extreme heat coupled with strained infrastructure, malfunctions and mechanical problems at 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 Thursday before the evening commute and again Friday morning, with Citing New Jersey Transit “AMTRAK overhead wire problems.”
While the root cause of the outages is still being investigated, they struck during some of the hottest days of the year so far, extending journeys amid an early summer heat wave.
“Unfortunately, a unique combination of events recently caused major delays in the New York area, affecting travel along an important section of the Northeast Corridor,” Amtrak President Roger Harris said in a statement Friday.
Harris added that on Thursday, a circuit breaker supplying the trains “experienced a catastrophic failure on one of the hottest days of the year and a heavy brush fire also came close to our tracks”.
He said Amtrak is also working with New Jersey Transit “to understand and address recent disruptions related to NJT trains operating on Amtrak’s Northeast Corridor infrastructure, which appears unique to the equipment and the area.”
Amtrak and New Jersey Transit trains share a century-old tunnel connecting New York and New Jersey. It is the only passenger rail connection between Manhattan and the rest of the Northeast Corridor, which runs from Washington, DC, to Boston.
Extreme heat stress infrastructure
While no single cause has been identified for this week’s transit disruptions, rail experts noted that extreme heat has the potential to strain infrastructure.
Many trains use a long, welded piece of metal called a “continuous weld” to operate, and when temperatures rise, it expands, creating stress and forcing the rail to buckle, said Curtis Morgan, head of the freight division and trade and a senior researcher. scientist at the Texas A&M Transportation Institute.
“It could cause a derailment,” he said. “Due to the additional stress on the railway, trains are ordered 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 hours-long delays.
Most Amtrak trains run between 125 and 155 mph, but when temperatures near triple digits, trains slow to between 80 and 100 mph, said Gerhard Williams, executive vice president of service delivery and operations at Amtrak, adding that extreme heat played little role. role in train disruptions this week.
New York City is under a heat advisory through Sunday night, with the heat index reaching near triple digits at times, according to the National Weather Service.
Clinton J. Andrews, director of the Center for Urban Policy Research at Rutgers University and an expert in engineering, urban planning and climate change mitigation, said the summer months will add pressure on rail infrastructure.
“The 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 particular concerns,” Andrews said. “The first is that both the rails, which are made of steel, and the catenary wires, which provide power for electric trains, tend to expand during a heat wave.”
Most of the delays and cancellations this week in the New York metropolitan area were caused by problems with power and overhead wires, a malfunctioning switch and a disabled train at Penn Station, transit officials said.
Mona Hemmati, a postdoctoral research scientist at Columbia University who specializes in climate physics, said the public can expect future mass transit delays and cancellations based on extreme weather caused by climate change.
“It is important to understand that high temperatures increase the risk of derailment. You have to consider the effect of high temperatures on steel, catenary wires and so on,” she said, referring to the wires that provide power for electric trains.
“We are seeing more heat waves due to climate change, rising temperatures and warming of the atmosphere. We should expect longer periods of extreme heat,” she added.
New Jersey Transit did not comment on weather-related delays, but said in a statement Friday that the impact on its service to customers this week was “unacceptable.”
“We are as frustrated as our customers,” he said.
New Jersey Transit operates 700 trains each weekday along the hundreds of miles between Philadelphia and New Haven, Connecticut, but most of the disruptions occurred between New Jersey and New York.
Frustrated travelers
Many travelers who suffered this week said they hope the situation will improve soon.
“I’ve used NJT three times this week and every time I’m screwed. I wrote a play and I was almost two hours late for rehearsal on Tuesday,” said Roma Torre, a New Jersey resident and former anchor at local news channel NY1 who regularly rides New Jersey’s transit system. “The problem is the service. weak, although I fully understand that we have infrastructure problems.”
Tina Palazzo, a lawyer who commutes to Manhattan via 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’s commute.”
Palazzo, of Scotch Plains, New Jersey, said she took off work Tuesday to make sure she wouldn’t miss her son’s high school graduation.
“It’s horrible and the communication is non-existent,” she said of her trip this week.
This article was originally published on NBCNews.com