On June 20, after millions of Americans had suffered through a sweltering heat wave for three days, Amtrak sent an ominous warning over social media: Trains connecting the largest cities in Northeast could face up to an hour of delay from high temperatures.
Later that afternoon, after the temperature peaked at 96 degrees in Newark, Amtrak lost electricity near the New Jersey side of the Hudson River tunnels. The power failure soon shuttered a 150-mile stretch of the busiest rail corridor in the United States for more than three hours. The impact reverberated until the next day, when trains chugged through with hours of residual delays.
As the planet rapidly warms, train delays and breakdowns are becoming more frequent as America’s antiquated rail infrastructure struggles to remain functional during prolonged extreme weather events that were not typical when the system was constructed.
A New York Times analysis of Amtrak data found that the rail service’s passengers have faced record delays in recent years caused by inclement weather such as heat waves, storms, floods, high winds, low temperatures, tornadoes, lightning and wildfires.
Extreme weather events bogged down Amtrak trains for more than 4,010 hours in the 2023 fiscal year, which began in October 2022 and ended in September 2023, according to a Times analysis of more than 313,000 individual train delay data dating to September 2003. That was the highest number of weather-related delays in at least 20 years.
The biggest contributor has been intensifying heat waves. About 30 percent of trains that arrived late in the 2023 fiscal year were delayed for heat reasons, accounting for nearly 1,200 hours of overall delays. Heat delays more than doubled from the 2018 fiscal year, when Amtrak passengers spent 530 additional hours in trains after high temperatures slowed down rail travel.
Railways made from steel are prone to deformities when exposed to direct sunlight during heat waves. The changes, known as sun kinks, occur when the steel overheats and buckles, creating wobbly and dangerous curves that require railroads to drastically reduce the speed of their trains to avoid derailments.
“You get a sun kink when the train’s on it — you’re dead,” said Louis S. Thompson, a former director of the Federal Railroad Administration who led efforts to revamp Amtrak service in the Northeast. “It’s going to go off the rails.”
Amtrak said the heat wave did not directly cause the power failure in June, but many rail experts said scorching sunlight on dangerously warm afternoons made unexpected breakdowns more likely to occur.
The rail infrastructure “just crumbles in the heat,” said Jim Mathews, the president and chief executive of the Rail Passengers Association, an advocacy group pushing for better reliability and an expansion of passenger rail service in the United States.
Olivia Irvin, a spokeswoman for Amtrak, said in a statement that “heat waves may create additional strain on power systems and related infrastructure generally” but that none of “the recent N.E.C. delays were heat-caused,” referring to the Northeast Corridor rail route.
Still, she acknowledged that a warming planet was creating challenges for the system.
“Amtrak is beginning to see climate conditions impact on-time performance and is taking action,” Ms. Irvin said in a statement. In 2022, Amtrak conducted an assessment of overall climate risks to its infrastructure in the Northeast as part of an effort to improve its response to adverse weather, she said.
Extreme weather that slows Amtrak trains in the Northeast also affects the region’s heavily used commuter rail systems, such as New Jersey Transit, SEPTA in Pennsylvania and MARC in Maryland, which all share tracks that Amtrak owns.
Without major investments in the centuries-old rail system, delays would only increase in the coming years, Mr. Thompson said.
“The B&P Tunnel going through Baltimore is a catastrophe waiting to happen, especially in heavy rains and high temperatures,” he said. Amtrak had weak points “that climate change is already attacking,” he added, such as the Hudson River tunnels that flooded in 2012 when Hurricane Sandy shut down rail traffic for days and forced months of service cuts during repairs.
Scientists say climate change is exacerbating the severity of storms as ocean temperatures rise, providing more energy and moisture that fuel stronger winds and downpours.
Amtrak, a federally owned passenger-rail company, is building new tunnels in Baltimore and under the Hudson River to replace the century-old structures. But neither is scheduled to be complete for another 10 years.
Abnormally high temperatures have accounted for an even larger share of weather delays along the Northeast Corridor, which runs between Boston, New York and Washington. About 2,200 trains carry more than 750,000 passengers daily along the route, which is the busiest in the United States.
Last year, heat was responsible for nearly 60 percent of delays attributable to a specific weather-related cause, adding more than 230 hours of travel time for Amtrak trains in the Northeast. Heat-delay hours in the region steadily increased since the 2018 fiscal year, when high temperatures slowed trains by 83 hours.
“You could live with it back when you had four or five really hot days in the summer,” said Mr. Mathews. “But now, there are so many heat days.”
The Times analysis on heat delays might be an undercount, Mr. Mathews said, because mechanical failures on a hot afternoon are sometimes recorded as a technical issue rather than a weather delay.
Other extreme weather events that had previously affected trains only a few times per year have also begun to increase. High tides, tornadoes, lightning strikes and wildfires each held up trains as much as 10 times more than in previous years, resulting in more than 200 hours of combined delays in fiscal year 2023.
That includes days like July 6, when a heat advisory was in effect throughout the Northeast. Lightning struck Amtrak’s power system, causing cancellations and delays between New York and New Haven, Conn., for hours. Climatologists say high temperatures make lightning strikes more frequent.
The delay records that The Times analyzed contain notes from Amtrak conductors that provide a detailed account on how extreme weather stalls train operations. One note from August 2023 cites a heat order that kept trains from going over 25 miles per hour, which led to a 2.5-hour delay between Tuscaloosa, Ala., and Meridian, Miss.
Amtrak does not own tracks outside the Northeast and small pockets of the Midwest, and freight railroads that host Amtrak often put out stringent speed restrictions during heat waves that affect passenger trains.
In the Northeast, once steel tracks reach 128 degrees Fahrenheit, Amtrak limits train speeds to 100 miles per hour. When tracks heat up to 135 degrees, train speeds are capped at 80 m.p.h. — around half of the top speed of Acela express trains. Those restrictions are often imposed when ambient temperatures reach 95 degrees or higher.
“These blanket speed orders can cause huge costs from delay,” said Jacob Helman, a senior data consultant at Resilient Analytics, a research group that builds models to predict future effects of climate change on various infrastructure.
A study that Mr. Helman coauthored estimates that train delays from heat waves will cumulatively cost at least $103 billion by 2100, as more passengers and freight are stalled every year. Across the country, railroads move roughly 40 percent of long-distance freight that requires traveling hundred of miles — the largest share among all means of transportation.
“Heat waves can take up entire regions, so you see huge impacts,” Mr. Helman said.
Tracks are not the only rail infrastructure that frequent heat waves threaten. Amtrak’s overhead power lines use a technology from the 1930s, and they sag under intense summer heat and interrupt electric transmission between train pantographs and wires.
Amtrak’s vulnerability assessment for the Northeast from 2022 designated the entire route from south of New York to Washington as highly susceptible to overhead power line malfunctions during heat waves. The study labeled New York as “a notable vulnerability hot spot” for a confluence of problems in rail operations caused by heat and heavy rain, including flooding, sun kinks, equipment malfunction and power outages.
Technical solutions exist, said Allan Zarembski, a professor in rail engineering at the University of Delaware. Steel tracks can be adjusted for higher temperatures by exposing them to heat before installation, a process that allows steel to endure more thermal stress.
“We have railroads going through the Mojave Desert and Death Valley,” Mr. Zarembski said. “It’s not that” railroad companies “don’t know how to deal with it.”
What is lacking is the political will to fund infrastructure upgrades that are crucial in the age of worsening climate change, not adequate technology, Mr. Mathews said. Last week, House Republicans advanced an appropriations bill that would cut funding for rail by more than $300 million. Last year, Republicans tried to slash Amtrak funding by 64 percent — and reduce the money allocated to the Northeast Corridor by 92 percent.
Amtrak is already struggling to secure sufficient funding to revamp its old rail system. Modernizing the Northeast Corridor, for example, has a price tag of $117 billion, mostly for repairing tracks and increasing capacity. The bipartisan infrastructure law Congress passed in 2021 devotes $30 billion for the Northeast Corridor, which needs new trains, bridges, tunnels, tracks and power systems. Amtrak can seek extra funding by applying for federal grants, which could provide a few billion dollars for projects in the Northeast.
The rail funding from the infrastructure law expires after the 2026 fiscal year.
“The fundamental dilemma of Amtrak is that Congress wants them to do big things, but they only want to fund small things,” Mr. Thompson said. “It’s always been a day late and a dollar short.”
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