Amtrak’s antiquated system for powering trains in the New York City region disrupted the morning rush again on Tuesday, a day that was already off to a bad start for thousands of city-bound commuters.
Amtrak, which owns Pennsylvania Station in Manhattan and the tracks and tunnels that connect it to New Jersey, reported at 9:50 a.m. that a “brief power outage in New Jersey” had caused train delays of up to an hour. That disruption also affected New Jersey Transit trains, which share Amtrak’s tracks between Trenton and Penn Station.
An Amtrak spokesman said the power failure stretched from its electrical substation in North Bergen, N.J., through Manhattan to Queens and lasted about 40 minutes.
New Jersey Transit said its train service into New York was suspended because of what it described as “overhead wire issues in the Hudson River tunnels.” As it often does during disruptions to its service, the agency announced that train tickets would be accepted for rides on its buses headed to the Port Authority Bus Terminal in Manhattan.
But there was a hitch in that plan.
Bus service into New York already was at a standstill on the New Jersey side of the river because of two incidents in the Lincoln Tunnel on Tuesday. The first was an early-morning motorcycle crash in the tunnel’s center tube, which resulted in the bike’s rider being transported to a hospital in critical condition, a spokeswoman for the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey said.
The center tube, which usually carries traffic into the city on weekday mornings, remained closed to all traffic until 9:15 a.m., she said. And in the city-bound south tube, a New Jersey Transit bus was broken down with one of its tires detached and pressed against a guardrail, a social media post at 8:19 a.m. showed.
By then, city-bound traffic was backed up to the New Jersey Turnpike and New Jersey Transit was diverting its buses to train stations in Secaucus, N.J., and Newark. Social media posts showed passengers getting off buses near the turnpike and walking along a roadway.
In short order, commuters were caught in a doom loop between buses diverted to train stations and suspended train service replaced with bus rides.
A spokesman for New Jersey Transit did not immediately respond to a request for an explanation of what went wrong.
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