(The Associated Press circulated the following story by Beth DeFalco on June 22.)
TRENTON, N.J. — Amtrak officials on Thursday said they are still puzzled about what exactly caused their newest and largest power substation to shut down in May, stranding thousands of passengers in several states for hours, but said equipment failure has been ruled out.
Testifying before a New Jersey state Senate committee, Amtrak Senior Vice President of Operations William Crosbie said the May 25 outage was the result of an automatic electrical shutdown at Amtrak’s largest substation in Philadelphia, which had a domino effect on other substations and caused the delays.
However, he said “the system did what it was supposed to do” to protect itself from electrical damage and even longer delays. “We didn’t have a piece of equipment fail,” he added.
Amtrak has been unable to pinpoint exactly what caused the first circuit-breaker to trip, leading to the shutdown on the Northeast corridor.
Crosbie and NJ Transit Executive Director George Warrington testified before the committee a day after a third power outage in a month caused train delays for Garden State and New York commuters.
Wednesday’s outage lasted for about 30 minutes at the height of morning rush hour, with 17 NJ Transit trains stopped in their tracks. Amtrak has said that was the result of “power fluctuations.”
A power failure on June 2 lasted 45 minutes when a transmission line took itself off line during a thunderstorm. That caused a frequency converter to shut down.
Frustrated senators grilled the two executives about what steps were being taken to prevent another outage.
Transportation Committee Chairman Sen. Nicholas Sacco said if Amtrak and NJ Transit don’t fix the problems, commuters will start heading back into their cars.
“Our goal is to get more cars off the road and more riders onto the trains,” said Sacco, D-Bergen and Hudson. “Commuters need to know that they can rely on NJ Transit to get to their destination on time or they will never leave their cars at home.”
The most recent outages were not related to the May 25 incident, Crosbie said, which affected as many as 40,000 commuters on 91 trains along Amtrak’s Northeast Corridor line from Boston to Washington. Twenty-six of the trains were New Jersey Transit trains.
Crosbie said Amtrak has put emergency equipment and a rescue locomotive at train tunnels to make it easier to rescue stranded passengers and has staffed the Philadelphia substation around the clock to monitor any power problems.
Warrington and several senators complained the federal government had failed to adequately fund infrastructure upgrades for Amtrak. Warrington said while 60 percent of Amtrak’s ridership travels along the Northeast Corridor, only 25 percent of its federal funding is used for infrastructure improvements along the line.
“I’m deeply concerned about the federal investment in this regional and national asset,” he said.
Crosbie wouldn’t say it was underfunded. He said year-to-year federal aid makes planning difficult and that he would like to see longer-term budget allocations.
In April 2005, the inspector general for the U.S. Department of Transportation told a Senate committee that Amtrak had a $5 billion backlog of capital projects and that deferred capital investments had led to several system failures, including the failure of a key electric cable during the August 2003 power blackout in the Northeast.