Commuters will see infrastructure improvements and better response and communications when something goes wrong, but Gov. Phil Murphy said that won’t guarantee this will be a perfect summer on the rails.
The joint partnership between NJ Transit and Amtrak convened again Tuesday with Gov. Phil Murphy Tuesday to update infrastructure work on Amtrak’s Northeast Corridor Line (NEC) that was accomplished between last fall and the coming warm months to avoid last year’s delays and service suspensions.
“Not withstanding the steps that have been taken, it doesn’t mean a train isn’t going to breakdown tomorrow, it’s very hard to bat a thousand,” Murphy said. “A lot of progress has been made...I think this yielded a lot of positive fruit for the commuter,“
Of the $12 million plus worth of work on the NEC between Newark and New Brunswick, Amtrak has replaced three and a half miles of new catenary wire that powers electric trains and replaced 9,500 pieces of catenary hardware.
Amtrak will spend an additional $40 million on upcoming work, focusing on identified “hot spots” including high usage areas between New York and Secaucus.
To do that work this year, Amtrak and NJ Transit officials agreed on a schedule of planned service outages. They will happen between March to June 1 on various rail lines to accommodate continued infrastructure work, said NJ Transit CEO Kris Kolluri.
Some of that work started on the Raritan Valley Line this week and will move to the NEC and a preliminary schedule will be publicized for riders.
A maintenance and inspection program of train parts that are susceptible to heat problems has been started to head off problems that sidelined equipment during last summers high temperatures, Kolluri said.
Protection crews will be strategically located in important areas of the corridor line to ensure a faster response time in the event of train or infrastructure problems that cause delays or service suspensions, he said.
NJ Transit is continuing an effort started in March to provide better real time information about delays and problems across all its alert and social media platforms. That includes customer service teams in New York and Newark Penn Station.
NJ Transit also will have senior management located in New York Penn Station’s Control Center for better train dispatching coordination.
That will be important because MetLife stadium has a record schedule of events this summer including World Cup club matches, which NJ Transit will help move people to and from, Murphy said.
NJ Transit will replace all of its older locomotives by 2031, the same schedule he outlined for replacing the decades old fleet of rail cars, Kolluri said. Of its 216 locomotives 45 are the newest dual mode that are powered by a diesel engine or by overhead electric wires.
Approvals and contracts for those purchases will be in place by the end of the year, Kolluri said.
That delivers on Murphy’s February budget message pledge to modernize all of NJ transits fleet.
Amtrak’s older rail cars, some which are 50-years old, are scheduled for replacement with modern “Airo” cars and a new fleet of Acela trains is scheduled to be put in service this spring, said Tony Coscia, Amtrak board chairman.
That roll out will happen in the next three to four years he said.
This was the third public report of a joint partnership between Amtrak and NJ Transit formed by Murphy on July 27, 2024 in the wake in the wake of Northeast Corridor service disruptions in New Jersey and New York Penn Station that occurred in May and June last year. They caused delays and service disruptions affecting thousands of NJ Transit and Amtrak passengers.
NEC infrastructure has been scrutinized during the past 11 months, when wire and signal problems, and rail equipment breakdowns, led to delays and crippling service suspensions as the region withered under intense heat waves.
NJ Transit trains were also scrutinized for defects in their pantographs, the roof-mounted power collection hardware, which were blamed for bringing down aging wires in some instances.
Improvements have been made to prevent damage to pantographs. NJ Transit is studying retrofitting older equipment with a device to automatically lower a pantograph in the event of a problem to avoid tearing down catenary wire.
The federal budget bill, which includes Amtrak’s fiscal year 2025 budget and was approved by Congress on March 14, provides funding for infrastructure renewal. This includes $40 million, double the previous funding level, officials said.
Still a concern is the $112 million in federal grants awarded last November for design and engineering work to replace aging catenary wire and signal systems, included in a larger total of $444 million in Federal Railroad Administration grants approved in November.
That question also was raised by U.S. Rep. Frank Pallone, D-6th Dist., and other members of the state congressional delegation in a March letter.
“We feel optimistic right now there is a consensus for making these investments,” Coscia said. “It is up to us to make them as prudently as possible.”
The ultimate fix will take longer and cost more. Amtraks’s former CEO Stephen Gardner estimated $630 million to replace 1930s vintage catenary wire between Newark and Elizabeth and $110 million to upgrade signals from Elizabeth to New Brunswick.
Amtrak is the landlord of the Northeast Corridor. NJ Transit will pay a total of $241.4 million to Amtrak, $128.7 million to lease tracks for its trains and $112.6 million toward upkeep and infrastructure improvement as required by a 2008 law.
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Larry Higgs may be reached at lhiggs@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on X @CommutingLarry
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