(The following article by Joe Malinconico was posted on the Newark Star-Ledger website on April 12.)
NEWARK, N.J. — Dozens of trains heading into Manhattan came to a standstill at the end of yesterday’s morning rush hour when a broken power switch shut down a crucial section of tracks in Newark, stalling more than 15,000 commuters.
The power failure delayed 32 trains on NJ Transit’s Northeast Corridor, North Jersey Coast and Raritan Valley lines as well as 23 Amtrak trains — some for as long as two or three hours. Many frustrated passengers were stuck waiting within eyesight of Newark Penn Station.
In the scramble to clear the rail bottleneck, NJ Transit canceled four trains, while Amtrak canceled three. A few eastbound trains were diverted to westbound tracks. Diesel locomotives rescued passengers on some stalled trains. Other passengers simply had to sit and wait, officials said.
The power switch, which is owned and operated by Amtrak, had been inspected within the past few months, said Cliff Black, a spokesman for the federal passenger railroad. Black said there was no indication that maintenance on the switch had been put off because of Amtrak’s financial problems.
“We don’t know yet what precipitated this failure,” Black said.
The broken switch shut off power to the main set of tracks heading toward Manhattan from 8:25 a.m. until 12:25 p.m.
The outage happened at a critical point, near where the secondary inbound track merges with the main one at a bridge. As a result, Amtrak also had to shut down the secondary track, officials said.
A passenger who rides the North Jersey Coast Line said she and other riders were annoyed by watching trains pass them by while they waited outside Newark Penn Station. Amtrak officials said the decision on which trains to reroute was made based on “operational” factors to break the bottleneck as quickly as possible.
NJ Transit spokeswoman Penny Bassett Hackett said her agency sent a “rescue” train to pick up passengers on one stalled train. The railroad also urged Manhattan-bound commuters to switch to the PATH system, which was honoring NJ Transit tickets on its trains.
Rail officials said things went smoothly during the evening rush hour.