(The Press of Atlantic City published the following report by Donald Wittkowski on its website on August 25.)
EGG HARBOR CITY, N.J. — Squat, metal sensors stick out of the ground next to the tracks of the Atlantic City rail line near the Bremen Avenue crossing. On the other side of the tracks is a boxy building reminiscent of an oversized outhouse.
The odd-looking sensors and the small building are part of a “hotbox” detection system that uses infrared scanning to check passing trains for overheated wheel bearings, a potentially disastrous condition that could cause a derailment.
Two hotbox systems are on the 67-mile Atlantic City line – one at the Bremen Avenue crossing in this Atlantic County town and the other at Bates Mill Road in Winslow Township, Camden County.
Despite their importance to safety, rail operator NJ Transit has taken both detection systems out of service because they have a history of false alarms and supposedly are incompatible with the type of commuter trains that run on the line.
NJ Transit spokeswoman Penny Bassett Hackett said the devices are better suited for the old freight trains that once were common on the railway. She said they do not work well with the NJ Transit passenger trains, so the agency decided to deactivate them in early 2002.
But she also noted that NJ Transit is re-evaluating its decision in the wake of recent mishaps on the Northeast Corridor rail line in northern New Jersey that could have been caused by overheated wheel bearings. The Atlantic City hotboxes might be reactivated after all, she said.
The union representing train engineers, however, claims that NJ Transit is compromising safety and simply doesn’t want to spend the money to repair the hotboxes.
“They are concerned about safety as long as it doesn’t cost them time or money,” Robert A. Daniels, legislative representative for the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers, said wryly.
Daniels also scoffed at Bassett Hackett’s claim that the hotboxes were installed years ago for freight trains. Actually, he said, they originally were used for Amtrak’s passenger trains, well after freight traffic no longer ran on the line.
The issue also has raised safety concerns with the Delaware Valley Association of Rail Passengers, or DVARP, an advocacy group that has been critical in the past of NJ Transit’s operation of the Atlantic City line.
Robert H. Machler, a founder and board member of DVARP, sided with the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers. He said the union is intimately aware of the rail line’s safety needs and should be able to judge the importance of the hotboxes.
“It definitely seems to be a safety issue,” Machler said. “I would trust the BLE by virtue of the fact that they operate under the system every day.”
One million passengers a year ride the commuter railway that links Atlantic City with Philadelphia. NJ Transit, which runs 28 trains a day, inherited the responsibility of maintaining the line after Amtrak discontinued its Atlantic City rail service in 1995.
Over the years, NJ Transit has flirted with the idea of killing its Atlantic City service because of the line’s multimillion-dollar operating losses. The operating deficit is now $11.3 million annually.
Daniels, who is an engineer on the Atlantic City line, suggested that financial pressures are behind NJ Transit’s decision to deactivate the hotboxes. He argued that the devices should be repaired to eliminate the false alarms instead of turning them off.
“NJ Transit says these things are plagued by false alarms and should not be in operation. To us, that is the equivalent of going to the doctor for treatment of a broken ankle and being told that they’re going to amputate the entire leg instead,” Daniels said.
“The thing is, our maintenance crews are top notch; they can easily fix these things. But NJ Transit doesn’t want to spend the bucks,” he continued.
NJ Transit officials could not say how much it would cost to repair the heat detectors, but Bassett Hackett disputed Daniels’ claims that the agency is more concerned about saving money than improving safety.
“Safety is, and continues to be, our No. 1 concern,” she said.
NJ Transit and Daniels provided different dates as to when the hotboxes went out of service. Bassett Hackett said it was in early 2002, while Daniels said Jan. 1, 2003.
When the hotboxes are working, heat-seeking infrared sensors scan the temperature of the wheel bearings as the trains pass by, even at their top speed of 80 mph.
If excessive heat – 200 degrees Fahrenheit or greater – is detected, an automated warning is sent to the train engineer. The engineer then stops the train and uses a heat-detecting wax pencil known as a Tempilstik to confirm whether the bearing is too hot.
The entire process is time-consuming and holds up the train. Bassett Hackett said that an unacceptable number of false alarms while the hotboxes were in service caused unnecessary delays.
“They were unreliable and giving out false alarms,” she said.
Daniels, however, argued that train engineers would not mind having to stop for occasional false alarms as long as there is a detection system in place to provide a safety net.
“Our members are concerned,” he said. “We would rather have to stop for 10 false alarms than miss one real one.”