Penned-up anger
Riders fume with rush still a mess
Amtrak’s big promise to have everything up and running by Friday morning totally fell apart by 4 a.m. — leaving Penn Station awash with angry, stranded commuters for a fifth day since Monday’s minor derailment.
“Just horrible!” one irate straphanger could be heard griping.
Amtrak — which owns the 21 tracks in and around Penn Station and is responsible for their maintenance — added insult to injury by making NJ Transit and the LIRR give up some tracks while mostly running Amtrak lines on schedule throughout the week.
“These are their messed up tracks that they have been ignoring for years, and everyone else has to pay for it,” groused one railindustry source.
Amtrak admitted Thursday that its tracks were the cause of both Monday’s NJ Transit derailment and a March 24 incident in which an Amtrak train derailed and then clipped an NJ Transit train.
It took until 8 a.m. Friday for Amtrak to announce that all tracks were finally up and running.
While the tracks remained operational into the afternoon, the morning was another commute from hell:
Ten LIRR trains were canceled between 6 and 10 a.m. Four other LIRR trains changed service to terminate in Jamaica. And NJ Transit also was impacted.
When the first two NJ Transit trains pulled into Penn Station early Friday, engineers found multiple track outages.
By 6:55 a.m., one track was still out, causing at least another hour of NJ Transit delays.