New Jersey’s entire congressional delegation is asking the federal government to investigate the repeated commuter meltdowns NJ Transit and Amtrak riders have experienced over the last six weeks.
The 11-member bipartisan group sent a letter to Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg last week asking the federal Department of Transportation to look into what keeps happening on Amtrak’s Northeast Corridor tracks — on which NJ Transit also runs most of its trains — and how future debacles can be prevented.
Riders of both services have been trapped for hours several times since May 22 as the rail lines experienced signal problems and as trains got stuck on the tracks. Some incidents halted all service in and out of Penn Station at times.
And while NJ Transit often blames Amtrak’s overhead wires, which can sag in extreme heat, Amtrak has often pointed to NJ Transit equipment as the likely culprit.
Either way, when a train’s pantograph — the equipment on a train that pulls power from the overhead wires — gets tangled up with those very cables, riders are left with massive delays.
The two sides say they’re stepping up inspections and bringing in outside experts to get to the root of the problem. But they caution that they’re chasing down issues on aging infrastructure, and the ultimate solution — a new tunnel under the Hudson River — is a decade away.
Rep. Mikie Sherrill — whose 11th Congressional District includes parts of Morris, Passaic and Essex counties — was among those leading the outreach to Buttigieg. She joined WNYC’s Sean Carlson on “All Things Considered” Wednesday to discuss the congressional delegation’s effort.
A transcript of their conversation is below. It’s been lightly edited for clarity.
Carlson: Congresswoman, can you tell us what you and your colleagues hope to accomplish with the letter?
Sherill: I think we hope to accomplish a sense of urgency to address this problem.
Congress has turned over to Amtrak $6 billion for the Northeast Corridor, and to have these meltdowns now routinely is just unacceptable. Commuters in my area are questioning whether or not they can continue to live in New Jersey if this is going to be the experience.
Have you gotten a response from the feds yet? And if not, are you expecting one?
We have not heard back yet, although Congressman [Rob] Menendez was questioning Secretary Buttigieg the other day when he came before the Transportation Committee. We submitted questions for the record. So we will continue to pressure the Department of Transportation to understand where they are headed with this, and how we are going to get better results and really to push in on that sense of urgency.
The sort lack of understanding of how we are going to fix this is really frustrating. You hear that the tracks are too hot or the wires get hot and hang too low. You know, it’s not going to get cooler, from everything we’ve heard. So these are really major questions of “How are we going to move forward and make sure our commuters have a better experience?”
You touched on exactly what we wanted to ask you about, the extreme heat wave the region was experiencing at the time of those meltdowns played a likely role in all of it. Electric wires sagging in the heat, sometimes they get tangled with the equipment on top of the trains. The non profit Climate Central published data today showing New Jersey is warming faster than any other state in the region.
So should commuters just be preparing for a new normal of sorts along these rail lines?
No, no, they should not, because we should be looking at how to become more resilient. Unfortunately, climate change is happening to us now, and we should not just let it go, assume that we are going to be able to do nothing about it or not meet it with innovation and resilience.
So that is why I’m demanding a sense of urgency. That is why we have put so much money from Congress into our infrastructure so that we can come up with these fixes, not only because we want to address the concerns we have about the future of heat waves — and certainly you’ve pointed out how quickly New Jersey is heating up — but also so that we can better address, as we did, for example, through the Inflation Reduction Act, better address climate change itself.
What are we emitting? How are we doing better by our environment, by the climate?
Is there anything Congress can do to compel Amtrak to improve or replace equipment?
Well, we are looking at that right now. Certainly, if Congress has appropriated money to an organization, Congress does have say over how that organization proceeds in many ways and has the ability to implement that or affect that.
So, we’re looking carefully at that. We are putting pressure on transportation. We are putting pressure on Amtrak so that we can understand what the plan is. We now are hearing that they are going to study exactly what the problems are. I hope that study includes not just the rail and the overhead wires, but also the signal failures and switches.
All of the things that we have seen over the years have impacted the commute right now. With the money that Congress has designated, now is the time to really update these lines to make sure that we are running a modern system.
And something else that’s really concerning to me is New Jersey, as you mentioned, NJ Transit rents these lines from Amtrak to the tune of almost $100 million a year. That is supposed to go to maintenance. So I would like to better understand how that money is being used as well.
Yeah, let’s talk about NJ Transit. You called on the agency to halt the 15% rate hikes that went into effect at the start of the month until the agency can improve rail service. But aren’t those rate hikes, along with the newly instituted corporate transit fee, supposed to be the funding streams that get NJ Transit out of its budget hole and kickstart these sorts of capital investments?
Well, I think we need a pause here. You can’t have people experiencing one of the worst commutes that they’ve experienced and then suggest that you’re going to hike the rates on them. I mean, my husband has called me over the past couple weeks to say, “Can you get one of our kids to lacrosse practice because I’m not going to make it home? I was going to go.”
This story in my home is is reverberating throughout my community .A lot of my communities were built up along the commuter rail lines, Madison, Chatham, South Orange, Maplewood These are all towns along the rail line. And so as you can imagine, people move to our communities so they can get in and out of the city quickly, they can get to and from work quickly so they can spend more time with their family.
This doesn’t just impact people’s ability to get to work. It impacts their ability to get home for dinner or to see a kid’s game. It really is a crisis when the commute is so incredibly horrible.