(The following story by Judy Rife was published in the January 13 issue of the Middletown Times Herald-Record.)
MIDDLETOWN, N.Y. — Metro-North Railroad’s on-time performance plummeted on the Port Jervis line in November and December as a result of recurring signal problems.
The railroad’s trains ran on schedule 89 percent of the time in November and 88.9 percent in December, pulling down the year’s on-time performance to 93.7 percent — the worst record among Metro-North’s four commuter lines.
“We had two back-to-back bad months because of signal problems,” said Margie Anders, a spokeswoman for Metro-North. “We started last week with four late trains — signal problems between Otisville and Howells — but things picked up the rest of the week.”
Metro-North routinely aims for 95 percent or above on-time performance. Last year, the Hudson line, which many Orange County residents take from Beacon, ran on schedule 98 percent of the time. The combined east-of-Hudson lines, the Hudson, Harlem and New Haven, had an average on time performance of 97.3 percent in 2002.
“[The] delays may be actually increasing the daily stress we all face, and this must be carried to our destination whether it is work or home,” said Tom Smith of Goshen, a commuter of 20 years. “Add the unheated cars [twice last week], and doors that will not open [Thursday on the first two cars of the 5:42], wet and slippery floors due to melting snow, windows that are so scarred from cleaning they are opaque & and you have a series of small things that add up to a lot of frustration.”
What complicates life for Smith and Metro-North’s 2,000 other Port Jervis line customers is that the railroad doesn’t own the tracks or operate the trains as it does on the other side of the river.
Here, it has to rent tracks from Norfolk-Southern Corp. and pay NJ Transit to run trains over them — a situation that prompts riders in Orange and Rockland counties to complain that they are the perennial orphans of the metropolitan region’s commuter rail system.
“We regularly urge Norfolk-Southern to do what has to be done to maintain our service and they generally are responsive,” said Anders.
Rudy Husband, a spokesman for Norfolk-Southern, attributed the signal problems to the weather and acknowleged the railroad hasn’t always been able to make repairs as quickly as everybody would like.
“It’s a priority to correct them as quickly as possible so Metro-North can keep their schedule,” said Husband.
Signal problems are endemic to a type of track called stick rail in winter’s cold weather. Snow and ice only serve to thwart ready access to the tracks and signal system. November brought weeks of below-average temperatures to Orange County, and December brought three major snowstorms.
As Anders explained in one of her apologies to commuters about the delays, about 40 miles of the 66-mile Port Jervis line is stick rail. Only the section between Middletown and Harriman is continuous welded rail, the rail of choice for most commuter lines.
Stick rail is bolted together with plates every 39 feet [versus every 1,500 feet with CWR]. Small wires carry the low voltage electrical current that runs through the rail across the joints. The wires can break in extreme cold, interrupting the circuit and causing the signal system to go dark and commuter trains to slow to 20 miles an hour from the usual 60. Distant controllers then “walk” the engineer of the blind train along the tracks.
Anders said Metro-North’s field supervisors had nothing but praise for Norfolk-Southern crews that maintain the signals and the line: “They work and they work and they have more overtime than they want. Before they can fix the breaks, they’ve got to find them and they find them walking the line.”
In addition, federal law regulates the hours that signal maintainers can work — a maximum of 12 hours on the job before a minimum of 8 hours of rest. On at least one occasion last month, the maintainers went home with signals unrepaired and the evening commute endured another succession of slow orders.
Husband said Norfolk-Southern has no plans to increase the number of signal maintainers stationed at Campbell Hall because “it’s not necessary, it’s not a manpower issue.” He blamed any delay in making repairs on the difficulty of accessing the tracks in the snow.
And Norfolk-Southern, which hasn’t made any major improvements to the Port Jervis line since it bought it from Conrail in 1997, has no plans to make any now.
“Although it’s an old system, it’s adequate for Norfolk-Southern’s needs,” said Husband. “Perhaps when you factor Metro-North in there, it’s becoming not quite adequate.”