(The New York Times posted the following article on its website on April 13.)
NEW YORK — Amtrak officials said last night that passenger service between New York and three Southern states, including Florida, had been suspended until tomorrow because of emergency repairs to a key bridge in North Carolina.
Service is expected to resume by noon tomorrow. Trains in transit were turned around, and a number were canceled.
“We determined that the safest thing to do was to stop all freight and passenger train traffic over the bridge until it could be repaired,” said Meg Scheu, a spokeswoman for CSX, which owns the rail corridor.
The disrupted Amtrak trains between New York and North Carolina, Georgia and Florida are the Silver Star, the Silver Meteor, the Carolinian, the Palmetto, and the Auto Train, which carries passengers and their vehicles to Sanford, Fla.
Vernae Graham, an Amtrak spokeswoman, said she did not know how many passengers had been affected, but said it could be more than 1,000.
Ms. Scheu described the bridge as “pretty much our I-95 corridor.”
A regularly scheduled inspection at about 3 p.m. yesterday of the Little River Bridge, near Rocky Mount, N.C., found a defect in a single panel of the six-panel iron bridge, which is 101 feet long.
The bridge carries 50 trains a day, mostly freight, Ms. Scheu said.