(The Newark Star-Ledger posted the following article by Joe Malinconico and Jeff Whelan on its website on July 16.)
NEWARK — As crews rushed to complete repairs to the tracks damaged in Monday’s derailment, a two-hour power outage shut down the alternate route into New York yesterday, ensnaring commuters in another miserable morning of delays.
The convergence of the two rail problems left only one track to carry two-way traffic between New York and New Jersey. Thousands of passengers on 35 NJ Transit trains and 15 Amtrak trains were stalled for as long as 75 minutes, officials said.
From roughly 6 to 8 a.m., two miles of the busiest stretch of railway in the country resembled a small-town road undergoing construction. The flow of traffic alternated back and forth on the one track, and some trains sat at locations beyond the closed tracks while dispatchers allowed trains to pass through in the opposite direction.
The tracks that had been ripped up during the two-car derailment in Secaucus were ready to carry trains again by 8:10 a.m., and regular service resumed on the Northeast Corridor and North Jersey Coast Line at noon. Officials said they would restore Midtown Direct service into Manhattan by today. Midtown Direct trains had been rerouted to Hoboken.
Meanwhile, investigators continued trying to figure out why a wheel had come off an Arrow III rail car — the sixth car in a 12-car train out of Trenton Monday morning — and why the three-member crew did not detect the impending problem. A half-hour before the accident, rail sensors had registered excessive heat on the train’s wheels, prompting an emergency stop and inspection in Edison.
Gov. James E. McGreevey said preliminary findings of the state’s inquiry would be made public today.
“I’ve requested the (transportation) commissioner set forth a thorough and agonizing evaluation of the performance of New Jersey Transit to undertake the necessary study to determine what happened and, perhaps as importantly, how to avoid a similar accident in the future,” McGreevey said.
As officials from the Federal Railroad Administration and NJ Transit looked on, the conductor who had checked the train during the stop in Edison re-enacted his emergency inspection yesterday, Transportation Commissioner Jack Lettiere said.
“We’re trying to find out, in debriefing with the crews, what exactly did they do,” Lettiere said. “How thorough was it? Did they follow the protocol exactly? That’s everything that is going to be flushed out today.”
NJ Transit uses 230 of the Arrow III rail cars, which carry passengers and can be powered themselves with electricity from overhead wires, without being pulled by a locomotive.
In 1996, an Arrow II, a similar model, lost one of its wheels when its bearings overheated on the Gladstone line, officials said. But preliminary indications were that the overheating in the 1996 incident — in which the train derailed but no one was hurt — stemmed from a different problem than Monday’s, officials said.
All the Arrows were rebuilt in 1990, with solid steel rods replacing hollow ones that were susceptible to heat problems, officials said.
“We’re particularly surprised because the car was recently overhauled last fall, (and) it was reinspected at the beginning of July,” Lettiere said after authorities inspected the sixth car yesterday. “And it’s a very thorough inspection that they go through, so it was a surprise to us. But quite frankly, it might have been a rare occurrence — but I want the investigation to tell me it was a rare occurrence.
“All accidents are preventable in one way, shape or form,” Lettiere added. “We have to make sure we have a full understanding of what the problem was. If it was a metal failure in the wheel or a motor problem or a bearing failure, I want to know that, so that we can go in there and examine the problem and do a complete engineering review and get the problem fixed.”
In response to passengers’ complaints about the lack of crew assistance as they sat in the derailed cars, Lettiere said he asked NJ Transit Executive Director George Warrington to look at the number of crew members aboard and whether it was enough. Lettiere also said training would be reviewed.
“If we find out in the final analysis that training was inadequate, I can guarantee you that there will be a training program,” he said. “We’re not going to, unfortunately, interview all of the passengers who were out there. But where there were deficiencies, they will get addressed. Nothing is going to get sugarcoated.”
Union leaders and railroad experts said NJ Transit should have had more than three crew members on board a 12-car train carrying about 1,200 people on an express trip from Trenton to Manhattan. Enduring a harrowing mile-long ride after the train derailed, passengers said they were left to fend for themselves to escape from tilted cars. Some climbed out windows.
“We always feel the more people we have on the trains, the more we can provide a safer ride for the passengers,” said Xavier Williams, general chairman of the United Transportation Union, which represents conductors and trainmen. “In an emergency situation, it’s always good to have more people present to assist the people who ride the trains.”
Even though there were three crew members on the train, the engineer is not supposed to leave the control room, so only the conductor and the rear brakeman would be available to help evacuate passengers.
“Two guys handling 1,200 people on a 12-car train? That works during regular service on an express train, but not in an emergency like this one,” said Bill Vantuono, editor of Railway Age, a trade magazine, and himself a commuter on NJ Transit’s North Jersey Coast Line.
“The probability of this happening is small, but are you willing to take that chance?” Vantuono said. “You’re potentially putting people’s lives at risk because the passengers don’t know what to do in a situation like this.”
“Thanks goodness one of the catenary lines didn’t come down,” he said, referring to the overhead wires that provide electricity for the trains. “They’re carrying 12,000 volts. If that line came down and someone jumped out of the car and stepped on it, I don’t have to tell you what would have happened.”
NJ Transit’s preliminary investigation has determined the train’s public address system broke down after the derailment.
For thousands of morning commuters, yesterday was a repeat of Monday’s delayed trip, after the railroad power outage ruined the railroads’ contingency plans.
Dan Stessel, a spokesman for Amtrak, which owns and operates the Northeast Corridor tracks, said a plan had been ready to keep traffic running in two directions while derailment repairs continued: Amtrak was going to activate new tracks that had been built for the as-yet-unopened Secaucus Transfer Station.
But at 5:50 a.m., an outage apparently caused by a wiring problem at a substation in Secaucus rendered the new tracks useless.
The worst delays were endured by passengers on train No. 3808, which was passing through the Secaucus Transfer at the time of the outage.
Passengers were stranded in that train for 75 minutes until a diesel locomotive arrived and pushed their cars all the way back to Newark Penn Station, where they were able to switch to other trains. Power was restored shortly before 8 a.m.