(The following article by Caren Halbfinger was posted on the White Plains Journal News website on May 1.)
WHITE PLAINS, N.Y. — A squirrel’s high-wire act gone awry was to blame for making 25,000 commuters late to work yesterday.
The unfortunate creature closed a circuit between high-voltage wires and an insulator, killing itself and disrupting power and leaving catenary wires at the New Rochelle train station drooping at 7:48 a.m., railroad spokeswoman Marjorie Anders said.
A train came by two minutes later and the wires wrapped around the insulator, getting snared in the train’s overhead arms, which broke off and took down the wires. The train was left without power.
The downed wires took up one track, and the powerless train took out another. The timing of the foul-up was just right to knock out the morning commute for a majority of the New Haven line’s riders. With a third track already out of service for construction, Metro-North Railroad had just one track available for both citybound and outbound peak rush-hour service.
“By 10:30 a.m., 24 inbound rush hour trains were late, as were 10 reverse-peak trains,” Anders said. “Most were 15 to 20 minutes late, but we did have trains up to 45 minutes late.”
Eric Bingham, 44, a Larchmont resident, had planned to take the 8 a.m. train from the village station. That would have gotten him to his job as a technology executive by 9 a.m. Instead, he was 45 minutes late. When told the railroad had only one track available, he said he thought Metro-North had done a satisfactory job of rerouting the trains.
“Hearing that, I think they did a good job,” he said. “As soon as they don’t give you a time on the delay, you know it’s a bad one. When the first train came through, it was a mob scene of people jamming in. I took the next train.”
With the majority of passengers heading to Manhattan, Anders said the railroad gave preference to citybound trains. For two hours, outbound trains skipped stops from Mount Vernon to Harrison. After 11:30 a.m., one train per hour stopped at those six stations. After that, there were scattered delays. Service was back to normal at 3 p.m., Anders said.