(The following story by Peter J. Howe appeared on the Boston Globe website on February 29.)
BOSTON — Amtrak, which has seemed to escape no piece of bad luck rolling out its Acela trains, now faces another crisis: Disintegrating concrete crossties under the tracks the high-speed cars ride on.
That could mean a fresh source of delays and hassles this spring and summer for riders taking Acela and other Amtrak trains to New York, Philadelphia, Washington, and other Northeast corridor destinations. It could also mean trouble for MBTA commuter rail riders on the Attleboro/Providence, Franklin, Needham, and Stoughton branches, which use segments of the Amtrak Northeast Corridor.
Although some of the work is not directly related to the concrete tie problem, Amtrak has decided to shut down a T commuter rail track between Back Bay and Readville stations for maintenance June 14-17, T spokesman Joe Pesaturo said late yesterday. That four-day period coincides with when Amtrak plans to shut down all service between Boston and New Haven and run bus shuttles while crews complete a $76 million replacement of an 89-year-old bridge over the Thames River between New London and Groton, Conn.
Pesaturo said T officials and their commuter-rail contractor will get more details next week and make plans for alternative June service for passengers at Hyde Park and Ruggles stations. “The project has benefits for MBTA customers, because replacing the ties will allow Amtrak to lift the current speed restriction” of 60 miles per hour to as high as 79 miles per hour, reducing travel time, Pesaturo said.
When maintenance work will be done south of Readville was not clear. Amtrak officials said yesterday they have no idea how many ties between Boston and Washington are affected, where, or how long they will take to fix.
The problems all involve ties made in Delaware by Rocla Concrete Tie Inc. Rocla has supplied one-quarter of the 3.4 million concrete crossties in the Northeast Corridor route, Amtrak said. The crossties are horizontal supports, placed in a bed of crushed stone, to which the rails are connected by steel clips.
Amtrak has replaced about 5,000 cracked concrete ties in the corridor and expects to spend about $24 million in each of the next two years replacing more of them. Since 1978, Amtrak has been replacing wooden crossties with concrete, which were supposed to last 50 years and ensure a smoother ride for 150 mile-per-hour Acela trains.
“We don’t know exactly how many ties are going to be replaced,” Amtrak spokesman Cliff Cole said.
Stressing that Amtrak is trying to stay ahead of a maintenance problem that has not led to any derailments or accidents, Cole said, “Safety is not an issue.”
While crews are at work replacing defective ties, Cole said, “delays, we’re being told, would be minimal.”
Matt Melzer – a spokesman for the National Association of Railroad Passengers, which lobbies for Amtrak customers – said rail advocates are anxious to know whether Amtrak will fix defective ties a little at a time or shut down the whole line for several days to do “a maintenance blitz.”
Freight railroads in the Midwest and west often shut down their lines for a week or two for maintenance, finding it less disruptive than having crews stop and start work between passing trains.
“These kinds of projects would tend to slow down some schedules, but we don’t know by how much,” Melzer said. Amtrak runs nine daily Boston-New York Acela trains.
Rocla did not respond to a request for comment.
The tie issue is the latest in a rash of headaches for Amtrak in upgrading Northeast corridor service.
The Acela trains went into service more than a year behind schedule, in December 2000, and were quickly beset with hitches, including mechanical-electrical problems that trapped passengers in restrooms, cracked suspensions in locomotives, and braking system breakdowns that caused Acela trains to be taken out of service in 2002 and 2005.
In the last year, the trains have begun making their schedules 85 to 90 percent of the time, and 2007 ridership soared 20 percent from a year earlier, to 3.1 million.