Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
East Coast rail system a mix of old, new
PHILADELPHIA — The trains that link global centers of learning, finance and power on the East Coast lumber through tunnels dug just after the Civil War, and cross century- old bridges that sometimes jam when they swing open to let tugboats pass.
Hundreds of miles of overhead wires that deliver power to locomotives were hung during the Great Depression in the 1930s.
The rails of the Northeast Corridor — between Washington, D.C., and Boston — are decaying, increasingly strained, and moving more people than ever around the nation’s most densely populated region.
The railroad’s importance became all the more apparent after last week’s train derailment, which shut down the line for several days, disrupting travel and commutes for thousands of people.
Amtrak Train 188, traveling from Washington, D.C., to New York, derailed Tuesday, killing eight passengers and injuring more than 200. At least eight people remained in critical condition in Philadelphia hospitals Saturday.
“While we do not yet know everything that happened, we do know — without question — that protecting rail passengers is our top priority,” Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx said
in a statement. The agency has ordered Amtrak to institute several new systems in the wake of the derailment. “The actions we have instructed Amtrak to take are aimed at improving safety on this corridor immediately.”
Still, the railway system is a mishmash of 19th century, 20th century and 21st century technology.
The crash refocused attention on the slow-motion deterioration of the vital piece of infrastructure that has a seemingly endless to-do list. By one estimate, it would take $21 billion just to replace the parts of the railway still in use beyond their intended lives.
And, “there just isn’t enough money to go around,” said Rebecca Reyes-Alicea of the Federal Railroad Administration. In her job as the agency’s Northeast Corridor program manager, Reyes-Alicea has been helping states pool their clout and push for federal money all along the corridor, rather than competing with one another.
But even with money already tight, federal officials announced Saturday that Amtrak must immediately expand its use of a modern speed-restriction system on Philadelphia’s northbound rails where Amtrak’s No. 188 train reached 106 mph in a 50-mph zone before Tuesday’s crash.
The Federal Railroad Administration said an emergency order would be issued in coming days that calls for Amtrak to ensure the presence of the automatic train control system that notifies an engineer when a train is above the speed limit and automatically applies the brakes if the engineer doesn’t act to slow the train.
“In areas where approach speed is significantly higher than curve speed, the appropriate technology intended to prevent over-speed derailments must be implemented immediately,” the agency said.
Amtrak said it would abide by the federal directive and others announced Saturday, adding that Amtrak’s “overarching goal is to provide safe and secure rail passenger travel.”
Amtrak’s ridership on the corridor has increased 50 percent since 1998, thanks mostly to the introduction of highspeed trains now favored by travelers who used to fly between New York, Washington and Boston. Amtrak reported a record 11.6 million riders on the corridor in fiscal 2014.
On a normal weekday, 2,000 trains operated by Amtrak and eight other passenger rail systems carry 750,000 riders between Washington and Boston, making it a vital link for intercity travelers and suburban commuters.
“The stakes are enormous,” Amtrak President Joseph Boardman warned in his 2015 request to Congress for funding. He said the corridor was experiencing a “crisis brought on by decades of chronic underfunding.”
Commuter railroads that rely heavily on the rail corridor, like the Metro-North Railroad serving New York and Connecticut, also have been breaking ridership records.
Reyes-Alicea ticked off a list of needs, ranging from a bigger station in Boston at the northern terminus to replacing obsolete bridges along many of the 450 miles that end next to Capitol Hill.
Half of the route’s 1,000 bridges are about a century old. Not all are at the end of their useful lives, but at current funding levels, it would take 300 years to replace all of them, according to the Northeast Corridor Commission of transportation officials.
A 105-year-old rail bridge over New Jersey’s Hackensack River, the Portal Bridge, opened to let a tugboat pass in February and then wouldn’t close for 45 minutes. Plans call for a pair of replacement bridges. The first one would cost $940 million.
There are 10 such “historic moveable bridges” along the corridor.
In Connecticut, officials are working on a plan to replace a swinging bridge — that pivots to let watercraft pass through — over the Norwalk River. It was built in 1896.
“As a piece of engineering, it’s just amazing,” said John Bernick, assistant rail administrator for the Connecticut Department of Transportation. “But, it’s certainly reached its retirement age.”
Last year, after some needed equipment changes, the bridge jammed and wouldn’t close, twice, at rush hour. The
computer that operates the bridge is from the 1980s.
Replacing the bridge, he said, could cost $650 million.
In Baltimore, trains pass through a 1.4- mile tunnel built in 1873. It is so narrow, decrepit and leak-prone that train speeds are limited to 30 mph.
With such chokepoints, the journey between Boston and Washington takes at least seven hours. Trains connecting major cities in France can cover a longer distance in less than half the time.
But no bottleneck on the Northeast Corridor is more potentially problematic, in the long haul, than where the tracks connect New Jersey and New York City under the Hudson River.
About 170,000 rail passengers make the crossing each weekday in a two-tube tunnel built in 1910. Some travel on Amtrak; more take New Jersey Transit trains.
A few years ago, officials had a plan funded to relieve
chronic backups at the crossing by building two more tubes in a second tunnel, but New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie pulled the plug on the project, citing concerns about his state’s share of the project’s cost.
Then, the existing tubes flooded when superstorm Sandy struck the city in 2012. The tunnel survived, but corrosive salt water did its damage. Now, Amtrak says both tubes will have to be taken out of service and overhauled, one at a time, sometime within the next 15-20 years.
Each tube could be out of service for a year, a loss of capacity that Amtrak has warned could lead to “profound disruption” of existing service.
That’s not a project that can be delayed indefinitely, said Tom Wright, president of the Regional Plan Association, an urban policy group that studies transportation issues.
“Someday, an engineer is going to go down and say, ‘You
know what? We can’t run the trains today. That leak looks too serious,’” Wright said.
Now, Amtrak is pushing another plan for two new tunnels, called the Gateway Program, but cost estimates have topped $16 billion, which would make the project bigger than anything Amtrak has undertaken previously.
“These problems are not going away,” Foxx, the Transportation secretary, said of the nation’s most important rail corridor. “They’re going to be there, and we’ve got to own up to it and figure out a way forward as a country.”
After Tuesday’s crash, Amtrak’s Boardman vowed to have advanced automatic-braking technology known as Positive Train Control in operation along the railroad by the end of the year, as Congress mandated in 2008. The system uses GPS, wireless radio and computers to prevent trains from going over the speed limit.
The system is already being used for southbound trains approaching the curve where Tuesday’s derailment occurred. A federal official familiar with the investigation, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said it was in place on one track and not the other because southbound trains are required to make a more dramatic deceleration in the curve than northbound trains do.
The Federal Railroad Administration has also ordered Amtrak to analyze curves to assess risks on the Northeast Corridor and determine if more can be done to improve safety.
Additionally, Amtrak will have to increase the amount and frequency of signs alerting engineers and conductors of the maximum authorized speed.