(The following article by David A. Michaels was posted on the Bergen Record website on December 31.)
BERGEN, N.J. — New Jersey travelers suffered through 157 hours of delays in two years because Amtrak routinely holds or slows down NJ Transit trains to move its own trains ahead, records show.
NJ Transit logs 55 million passenger trips on 115,000 trains each year that travel on the Northeast Corridor — the nation’s busiest passenger railroad — including shuttling North Jersey commuters from Secaucus to Manhattan. Amtrak, by contrast, runs about 33,000 trains a year on the corridor, and recorded 4.5 million trips between New York and Washington, D.C., in 2006.
But Amtrak controls the tracks, and that means it can give preference to its trains when they are running late and find themselves behind a slower local train.
NJ Transit and Amtrak disagree about how often such delays occur, and Amtrak officials even say they sometimes hold back their own trains for the benefit of NJ Transit. NJ Transit’s figures, however, show that hundreds of commuter trains are detained every year to allow Amtrak to pass them on the corridor.
In most cases, the delays are marginal — about 12 minutes or less. Occasionally, however, the practice can cause significant backups, according to a Record analysis of NJ Transit’s train-delay database.
One Sunday evening in September, for instance, an NJ Transit train arrived 37 minutes late to New York Penn Station because it was twice held to allow Amtrak trains to pass it, then was stopped again near the Hudson River tunnels that lead into Manhattan to permit westbound trains to get through first. That last tie-up would not have happened without the earlier delays, NJ Transit officials said.
“We don’t agree their service is premium to ours, but you have to understand to some extent it’s their railroad,” said Kevin J. O’Connor, NJ Transit’s deputy general manager for transportation.
Some experts say preference is a symptom of the inequality between Amtrak, which relies on federal funding, and NJ Transit on the shared track. While NJ Transit, a state agency, has contributed hundreds of millions of dollars to the corridor’s upkeep, it has no control over dispatching.
“The priority issue is a very serious symptom of a much deeper issue — New Jersey Transit’s stake and lack of control,” said Martin E. Robins, director of the Alan M. Voorhees Transportation Institute at Rutgers University. He advocates stripping Amtrak of its ownership of the corridor.
Joint control proposal
NJ Transit wants to establish a joint control center that would give it dispatching authority.
“That is something we are actively pursuing with Amtrak, so that we have more control over the territory on which our trains operate,” NJ Transit spokesman Dan Stessel said.
Douglas Bowen, president of the New Jersey Association of Rail Passengers, said NJ Transit exaggerates Amtrak’s impact on its service.
Indeed, NJ Transit’s figures sometimes overstate the impact of preference delays. In several cases, the state railroad faulted Amtrak when a more serious problem, such as a locomotive failure, also occurred. The mechanical failure caused a much longer delay, but the entire delay was blamed on Amtrak’s decision to let its trains pass.
Blaming Amtrak has become “a convenient finger-pointing exercise” for NJ Transit, Bowen said.
“If you are going on the assumption that numbers count, and an NJT train with 1,000 people should take precedence over an Acela with 150, you can make that case,” Bowen said. “But sometimes it’s the other way around.”
In fact, Amtrak officials said they sometimes delay their own trains to move NJ Transit ahead on the corridor.
“It’s done to benefit the operation as a whole at that moment in time, so the entire flow continues,” said Michael J. DeCataldo, Amtrak’s general superintendent for its northeast division.
But occasionally, Amtrak has delayed commuter trains to benefit its own trains that are already significantly late.
On Sept. 12, for instance, dispatchers slowed down NJ Transit trains near Elizabeth to route ahead an Amtrak train from Florida that was 91 minutes late, according to NJ Transit records. The decision caused delays for five other commuter trains of between eight and 13 minutes, records show.
NJ Transit officials said they did not agree with that decision.
“Should their late train go ahead of ours? I don’t think so,” said O’Connor. “Ours is on time and where it should be.
“But the dispatcher does not have a good decision — delay the Amtrak train further or delay the NJ Transit train.”
O’Connor, who previously served as a general manager in Amtrak’s New York division, said the Amtrak train was likely slowed by freight traffic south of Washington, D.C. Amtrak does not own the track in that part of the country, and freight companies often slow down Amtrak to move their cars ahead of passenger trains, he said.
“We talk about the impact of preference on our trains, but that is minuscule compared to what the freight operators do to Amtrak off the corridor,” O’Connor said.
Cliff Cole, an Amtrak spokesman, declined to address Amtrak’s actions on that day.
Numbers disputed
Although Amtrak doggedly tracks the impact of other railroad companies on its service — an NJ Transit train slowing down its train is recorded as “commuter train interference” — it does not recognize preference as a cause of delays.
But in response to questions from The Record, Amtrak officials provided figures that suggest Amtrak’s dispatchers grant preference to NJ Transit more often than they do to their own trains. Amtrak’s figures measure the delays differently than NJ Transit does.
Cole said Amtrak identified the delays by looking through records in a database “for what might be considered preference delays.”
Amtrak said 608 NJ Transit trains were delayed in 2006 to allow Amtrak trains to pass them, while “approximately 700” Amtrak trains were delayed to allow NJ Transit trains to move ahead.
Amtrak declined to provide figures showing the length of each delay.
“The joint cooperation between Amtrak and NJ Transit has produced a 90 percent daily OTP [on-time performance] for New Jersey Transit trains using the Northeast Corridor,” Cole wrote in an e-mail, “which given the amount of train traffic run each day on the NEC, is a remarkable accomplishment.”
NJ Transit officials disputed Amtrak’s numbers.
“Invariably, when one of their trains is delayed by ours, it is because theirs is late and they are following one of ours that is on time,” O’Connor said.
NJ Transit’s figures indicate that Amtrak exercised preference fewer times in 2006 compared with previous years. O’Connor said 220 NJ Transit trains were delayed for that reason through October.
That is down from a high of 603 delays in 2002 and 590 in 2005, The Record’s analysis showed.
This year, preference occurred most often during the evening hours, when trains traveling toward New York are restricted to a single track in some places.
Officials at both railroads said they have worked hard to minimize delays on the corridor. The track’s 61 miles between Trenton and New York handle the most passenger traffic of any section of the corridor.
The improved performance of Acela, Amtrak’s premium service, has helped to drive down the number of preference delays this year, officials said. When an Acela train is late, it is often routed ahead of NJ Transit.
“If there is a train that can go 135 miles per hour, versus a train that can go 80 … that makes the most sense to clear up the railroad,” DeCataldo said.