(The following article by Matthew L. Wald was posted on the New York Times website on June 8.)
WASHINGTON — In response to last month’s widespread power failure, Amtrak has put a rescue locomotive near the entrance to the Hudson River train tunnel system between New Jersey and Pennsylvania Station to remove stranded trains.
In a letter to New Jersey Transit, whose trains run on Amtrak’s rails, Amtrak said the rescue engine, with a crew and special coupling equipment, was among several steps being taken to help the railroads recover more quickly from power failures, like the ones on May 25 and last Friday.
But Amtrak has not found out why the failures were so extensive, and it wants to bring in an outside group of experts to evaluate the blackouts. It described the May 25 failure, which stretched from Washington to New York, as the worst in 23 years, and said the cause was the failure of two devices to share the power load properly; one is owned by Amtrak and the other by the Philadelphia Electric Company.
The letter, dated Wednesday, was from David J. Hughes, the acting president of Amtrak, to George Warrington, the executive director of New Jersey Transit. Mr. Warrington said in a statement on Thursday that New Jersey Transit shared Amtrak’s interest “in bringing this to closure to ensure that future outages do not occur.”
On May 25, 30,000 New Jersey Transit passengers were delayed, along with 4,200 Amtrak passengers, as well as commuters on suburban lines in Philadelphia, Baltimore and Washington. Three of the New Jersey trains, with hundreds of commuters, stalled in the tunnels. Amtrak’s letter also disclosed that a third electric disruption occurred last Saturday, but said each disruption appeared to have a different cause. On May 25, the rescue of the first train from the tunnel system went smoothly, but the “removal of the other two N.J.T. trains took much too long.”
One problem was that coupling equipment on the locomotives and the trains, called knuckles, was incompatible. The locomotive now standing by near the tunnels is equipped with “all necessary compromise knuckles,” the letter said.
Amtrak buys electricity from utility companies that offer alternating current with 60 cycles a second, the American standard, but its trains run on an archaic 25-cycle system. Amtrak said it was now staffing one of its frequency converter stations, near Philadelphia, 24 hours a day.
In a fact sheet with the letter, Amtrak said it owns three of six power supply stations between Washington and New York, the oldest built in 1992. But it described the other three as “1930’s era.” One of those is owned by Public Service Gas & Electric, one by Philadelphia Electric and one by Pennsylvania Power & Light and Baltimore Gas & Electric. The three Amtrak installations are electronic, and the three owned by the utility companies are mechanical.
Amtrak said the power failure last Friday, which lasted 45 minutes, occurred when a Philadelphia Electric Company transmission line took itself out of service during a thunderstorm, causing the frequency converter to shut down. Amtrak said it was not clear why. The failure on Saturday occurred when a tree hit a power line.
Amtrak’s six supply stations can provide more than twice the amount of electricity that the trains require during rush periods, but on May 25 one station had been closed for maintenance.