(The following article by Sewell Chan was posted on the New York Times website on January 15.)
NEW YORK — A downed electrical wire and a broken track switch caused delays yesterday for thousands of New Jersey Transit and Amtrak passengers trying to get to or leave from Pennsylvania Station, officials said. The mishaps were repaired before the start of the evening commuter rush.
At 10:06 a.m., a New Jersey Transit train’s pantograph – the extensible arm that draws electricity into the locomotive – became tangled in a set of overhead wires as the train moved through a tunnel, according to a spokesman for New Jersey Transit, Dan Stessel.
No passengers were on board the train, which pulled down parts of the wires. The train was on its way to a rail yard in Sunnyside, Queens, which is used to maintain and turn train cars before they return to Manhattan and then New Jersey.
Only a few minutes later, in a tunnel just west of Pennsylvania Station, another New Jersey Transit train damaged a switch that allows trains to move across tracks, Mr. Stessel said.
He said that both incidents were under investigation, and that a preliminary investigation by Amtrak, which maintains the tunnels, showed that the overhead wires might have been damaged or frayed and that the damage to the switch might have been the result of an error by the train operator.
The wires and the switch were repaired by 2 p.m.
The incidents caused delays of 18 minutes to just more than an hour on 12 New Jersey Transit trains.
Three trains were turned around at Secaucus, where passengers could board other trains to Hoboken and then Manhattan. Two other trains were turned around at Newark, where passengers could use their tickets on Port Authority Trans-Hudson trains to get to the World Trade Center station in Lower Manhattan.
Seven Amtrak trains on the so-called main spine, or Northeast corridor, were delayed by an average of nearly one hour, according to R. Clifford Black, an Amtrak spokesman.