(Reuters circulated the following article on June 8.)
WASHINGTON — Amtrak has traced an electrical outage two weeks ago that abruptly disrupted Northeast rail service to problems at Philadelphia-area power stations, the railroad said on Thursday.
In a letter to executives at New Jersey Transit — which had trains stranded in tunnels during the May 25 morning rush-hour outage — Amtrak’s acting president, David Hughes, said a preliminary investigation found that power conversion facilities in Philadelphia and Chester, Pennsylvania, just outside the city, were involved.
It was the worst problem of its kind for Amtrak in 23 years, the railroad said.
The outage triggered a cascading failure of electrical systems along the southern end of Amtrak’s flagship Northeast Corridor line, disrupting service between Washington and Boston.
The worst problems were between Washington and New York where busy commuter lines were affected for hours in addition to Amtrak service. Many trains were stopped between stations, including three New Jersey Transit trains and one Amtrak train that were stuck in New York tunnels.
Amtrak said on Thursday that it took too long to remove two of the commuter trains and will now have an extra locomotive and crew in place at New York’s Pennsylvania Station to respond to any emergency.
While Amtrak has pinpointed the location of the problem, it has not yet determined what exactly disrupted the conversion of high voltage electricity to levels needed to run trains.
“We hope in the next two or three weeks to have more answers on this,” said Amtrak spokesman Bill Schulz.
Amtrak owns the 4-year-old facility in Philadelphia, while Philadelphia Electric Co. (PECO) owns the 1930s-era station in Chester.
Schulz did say that the problems are not related to Amtrak’s long-standing financial problems. “We have not seen this as a lack of maintenance or a cost issue in any way,” he said.
He also said that two other power problems in Philadelphia that caused minor delays on June 2 and 3 were unrelated to the May 25 incident.