(The following article by Laura Mansnerus was posted on the New York Times website on June 22.)
TRENTON, N.J. — An Amtrak official told a State Senate committee on Thursday that he could not explain why there had been four power failures in the past month on the heavily traveled Northeast rail corridor, although he tried to assure wary legislators that another shutdown of the system was unlikely.
“We’re very confident at this point that it’s highly unlikely that it would happen again,” said the official, William Crosbie, Amtrak’s senior vice president for operations, speaking to reporters after testifying before the Senate Transportation Committee.
Rail officials say the four power failures — the latest occurred during the Wednesday morning rush — had different causes, but Mr. Crosbie said outside experts hired to investigate the most serious failure, which occurred on May 25, were expected to finish their report in three to six months.
He said a systemwide shutdown was a “very rare event” that had not happened in more than 24 years.
In the May 25 failure, 41,000 passengers on 91 trains between Washington and New York were delayed, and two New Jersey Transit trains were stuck in the Hudson River tunnel for five hours.
Mr. Crosbie said that failure had been traced to two of the six power stations along the Northeast Corridor, one in Chester, Pa., and another in Philadelphia, that provide electricity for the line.
He emphasized that “the system did what it was supposed to do,” shutting itself down during a power overload as a circuit breaker would do, and that power was restored in two and a half hours.
The director of New Jersey Transit, George D. Warrington, told the committee that the May 25 failure and the three smaller disruptions — on June 2, June 3 and Wednesday — showed that the federal government was risking the rail system in New Jersey and New York by starving Amtrak’s infrastructure.
“I am deeply concerned about the federal investment in this regional and national asset,” Mr. Warrington said, adding that the Northeast Corridor “has been held hostage to a 30-year-long ideological debate” about intercity rail service.
“In the end it’s always about money,” he said, “and always about trying to offload responsibility to somebody else, in this case the states.”
Senate President Richard J. Codey, who had called for the hearing, said that “if this continues it will be a disaster, because if it continues people will jump off these trains and back into their cars.”
While several senators questioned Mr. Crosbie about the funds for maintaining the 225-mile stretch of tracks, he said believed the May 25 breakdown was “not directly related to the infrastructure being in a state of disrepair.”
Mr. Crosbie also noted that the Lamokin power station in Chester is not owned by Amtrak but by a Pennsylvania utility, PECO Energy. Of the six power stations that feed the Northeast corridor, three, including the Philadelphia station, are owned by Amtrak and were put into service between 1992 and 2002. But he described the station owned by PECO and the other two owned by different utilities as “1930’s-era facilities.”
Several senators joined in Mr. Warrington’s complaint about Amtrak, as did Gov. Jon S. Corzine. “We need fundamental investment in Amtrak,” Mr. Corzine said at a news conference on Thursday morning. “Our work needs to be in the United States Congress to push funding for Amtrak, or there will be more breakdowns and more problems.”
The three failures this month, which rail officials are calling “voltage fluctuations,” were caused by damage to power lines that shut down substations.
Daniel E. Stessel, a spokesman for New Jersey Transit, said that the June 2 disruption delayed 37 trains and that the failure on June 3, a Saturday, delayed 21 trains. On Wednesday, Mr. Stessel said, 17 trains were stopped and 50 were delayed between Newark and New York for up to an hour.
Since the May 25 shutdown, Mr. Crosbie and Mr. Warrington said, the rail lines have improved rescue operations, positioning locomotives near the Hudson River tunnel to pull out stalled trains in the event of another power failure.