(The following article by Joe Malinconico was posted on the Newark Star-Ledger website on October 6.)
NEWARK, N.J. — At the end of a recent evening rush hour, Amtrak’s Portal Bridge swung open to allow a barge to pass through on the Hackensack River between Kearny and Secaucus.
Within minutes, 15 NJ Transit commuter trains were at a standstill. Some were waiting at the river for the span to swing back into place. Others remained at stations until connecting trains could catch up.
By the time the bridge swung back into place 15 minutes later, thousands of riders on the Northeast Corridor, North Jersey Coast Line, Raritan Valley, Morris and Essex, Montclair-Boonton and Midtown Direct lines had sat through delays that ranged from nine to 23 minutes.
It was all pretty routine. The same thing happens whenever the Portal Bridge opens on the Northeast Corridor between Newark and New York, the nation’s busiest stretch of passenger railroad tracks.
But in an effort to curtail delays, the U.S. Coast Guard decided yesterday to impose new restrictions on when the bridge can open for river traffic, a move that had been requested by Amtrak and NJ Transit.
In a nod to increasing rail traffic on the bridge, the span will stay in place from 6 to 10 a.m. and from 4 to 8 p.m, starting Nov. 4.
That expands the hours from what had been decided upon in 1980, when the Coast Guard enacted regulations that ensured the span would stay in place from 7:20 to 9:20 a.m. and from 4:30 to 6:50 p.m.
But rail traffic has increased dramatically since then. On average, more than 450 trains carrying about 162,000 people cross the Portal Bridge each day. About half those trains pass through during rush hours.
“If it happens at the wrong time of day, you’re talking about significant numbers of trains that are affected,” NJ Transit spokesman Dan Stessel said. “There’s a cascading effect.”
“We want to accommodate the railroads, but we also have an obligation to open the bridge for maritime traffic,” said Gary Kassof, the Coast Guard’s bridge program administrator for the northeastern United States. “The bottom line is the commercial vessels don’t have any other way of getting through there so we have to take that into account.”
The bridge isn’t exactly busy with river traffic. In 2003, for example, the Portal Bridge had to open 141 times to allow barges and other boats to cross.
Most of the river traffic comes from Amerada Hess oil storage terminal in Bogota and the Bergen County Utilities Authority’s sludge barges from Little Ferry. Now and then, some pleasure boats pass through, officials said.
Hess and the utilities authority already try to avoid the bridge during the rail rush-hour, Kassof said. But the barges need to travel during high tides, especially when they are fully loaded, or risk getting stuck in shallow water.
“You have to work around the tides,” said Leonard Kaiser, executive director of the utilities authority. “It can get a little delicate at times.”
The Coast Guard’s new rule includes a clause that would allow commercial vessels to pass through the bridge during the expanded hours under certain conditions.
“Occasionally, there are going to be times when they’re jammed and there’s no other choice,” Kassof said.
In the winter, for example, the demand for heating oil results in an increase in traffic from Hess. Shipments must be made on the days when high tides coincide with rail peak periods, said John Bowie, logistics manager for Hornbeck Offshore, the company that runs Hess’ tank barges.
“We can’t afford to lose that,” he said. “We would not undertake anything that would prevent us from making deliveries to our customers.”
The Coast Guard already has evaluated the impact of its proposal during two 90-day test runs — one that went from March through May 2004 and another that ran from mid-December 2004 to mid-March of this year.
During the spring test, the bridge had just one rush-hour opening, causing a total of 54 minutes in train delays compared with 13 openings and more than 20 cumulative hours in delays for the same time the previous year.
The results for the winter test were somewhat less dramatic, partly because of provisions that allow more oil barge traffic to pass through. There were 11 openings resulting in 13 hours of train delays during the winter test, compared with 26 openings and about 27 hours of rail delays.
“It functioned pretty well,” Kassof said of the tests.