Amid a flood of criticism about the latest wave of chaotic rides, Amtrak and New Jersey Transit officials laid out a plan Thursday to identify and fix problems plaguing their operations.
The two railroads, which share Amtrak’s Northeast Corridor tracks from Pennsylvania Station in Manhattan to Trenton, NJ, have vowed to review their infrastructure and equipment to investigate why they have performed so poorly over the past several weeks. The detailed plan came after an impromptu meeting Thursday called by New Jersey Gov. Philip D. Murphy.
Mr. Murphy, a Democrat who promised to fix New Jersey Transit’s operations if it killed him, said the series of outages had been “unacceptable.” Kevin Corbett, the transit agency’s chief executive, and Amtrak Chairman Tony Coscia agreed.
“Our absolute commitment is to get things right,” Mr. Murphy said at the roundtable meeting, held in his Newark office.
Officials have yet to reach a consensus on what is causing all the delays and service suspensions to and from Penn Station in Manhattan, the nation’s busiest transit hub.
Most of the breakdowns occurred on the busiest segment of the Northeast Corridor, between New York and Newark. Some are clearly caused by failures of Amtrak’s aging infrastructure. But others have involved New Jersey Transit trains getting caught in the overhead electrical wires that power them.
The two railroads had what Mr. Murphy called a “dysfunctional relationship” and a history of pointing fingers at each other. But they are now vowing to share the blame and root out their flaws in a cooperative spirit.
Their joint investigation will include more frequent checking of overhead wires and inspection of mechanical arms that extend from the roofs of trains to contact those wires. They said New Jersey Transit would install high-resolution cameras to inspect those weapons, known as pantographs, on its trains.
In the meeting, Mr. Coscia said commuters and commuters should expect the railroads to be reliable. “We’re going to fix these problems” and get to “a place where operations are much better than they have been,” Mr. Coscia.
The summit came a month after Mr Murphy sent an angry letter to Mr Coscia and two days after New Jersey’s congressional delegation wrote to Pete Buttigieg, the secretary of transportation, calling for an investigation into the latest breakdowns. The letter said the outages were “seriously undermining the quality of life for New Jerseyans and their families.”
One of those members of Congress, Representative Frank Pallone Jr., a Democrat, has called on Amtrak to replace all overhead electrical wires and signals along the corridor between New Brunswick and Penn Station.
Representative Mikie Sherrill, another Democrat from New Jersey, called Thursday for New Jersey Transit to “pause and reevaluate” a 15 percent fare increase that is scheduled to take effect July 1. Mr. Murphy, who controls the agency’s board of directors, said at the meeting that he would leave this decision up to the board.
Rail travel along the Northeast Corridor is a major political issue in the state because New Jersey Transit carries tens of thousands of daily commuters in and out of New York City. The agency runs far more trains along the tracks than Amtrak, so any service disruption there affects more of its customers, especially during rush hours.
On Monday evening, service was briefly suspended while Amtrak workers inspected power lines in a tunnel under the East River in New York City. A New Jersey Transit train crew had reported that the tracks were on fire, prompting fears that they had been damaged.
The cause turned out to be chunks of concrete that broke away from the tunnel ceiling, Mr Corbett said. Service was restored, but not before many commuters had their journeys home disrupted.
This suspension followed other major rush hour delays at Penn Station last month. Last Thursday, one of the hottest days of the year, an afternoon power outage left thousands of commuters stranded at Penn Station and on non-air-conditioned trains. Last Friday morning, a disabled train caused delays of up to an hour in and out of Penn Station.
Earlier that week, New Jersey Transit service to and from Penn Station was suspended for about an hour, and all Amtrak trains passing through the station were delayed due to problems with overhead wires and a disabled passenger train. on the tracks, train officials said.