Commuters and other travelers along America’s busiest stretch of passenger railway have faced a nightmare summer of heat-related delays and cancellations that are complicating the transit legacy of a president nicknamed “Amtrak Joe.”
Record heat has exposed long-standing physical problems along the Northeast Corridor between Boston and Virginia that highlight the need for planned improvements that would get a big boost from the bipartisan infrastructure law while leaving officials without immediate answers for outraged constituents.
“It’s incredibly frustrating,” said Rep. Josh Gottheimer (D-N.J.), a potential 2025 gubernatorial candidate and lead negotiator for the landmark infrastructure law. “People are going to lose faith in the transportation system. It just ups the urgency of investing and addressing these issues.”
This summer’s struggles are threatening to derail Amtrak’s post-Covid rebound, which has seen Northeast Corridor ridership exceed pre-pandemic levels and spurred expansion plans aimed at doubling overall ridership by 2040. But they’ve also raised questions about the rail system operator’s ability to balance growth ambitions with the need to upgrade and maintain existing service at a time when climate goals depend on getting people out of polluting cars.
A 2022 Amtrak report projects significantly hotter and wetter conditions that could lead to $220 million in losses in the next decade, turning one of the most environmentally-friendly means of travel into a major climate resilience question.
The Northeast Corridor was given special emphasis after President Joe Biden signed the $1.2 trillion infrastructure law because of its high ridership and the dense population of its service area. But like many of the projects being funded by that package, it could be years before efforts to upgrade trains, tunnels and bridges lead to improvements that reduce the kind of breakdowns that have drawn public fury.
“These types of service disruptions can have a chilling effect on your customer base and their confidence,” Connecticut Transportation Commissioner Garrett Eucalitto said in an interview.
Trains often travel at reduced speeds in hot weather given the risk of steel track expansion and other issues. But a combination of power failures, century-old overhead wires succumbing to hot conditions, equipment malfunctions and even a brush fire have made this summer particularly rough.
Amtrak’s Northeast Corridor trains had an on time rate of 69 percent in June, a 10-percentage point drop from the preceding 12-month average and well below its own 80 percent on-time minimum standard.
NJ Transit had 657 cancellations in June, the fourth-worst month since data became available in 2017 — with 63 percent of those cancellations due to issues with Amtrak, which owns the majority of tracks in the Northeast Corridor, though the numbers improve without Amtrak-related causes.
That’s prompted finger-pointing between Amtrak and NJ Transit — and anger from elected officials. The two companies have been “accelerating” inspections and maintenance in response to the disruptions.
New Jersey’s entire U.S. House delegation formally asked Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg to investigate the issues. Rep. Mikie Sherrill (D-N.J.) unsuccessfully pushed for NJ Transit to pause a planned 15 percent fare hike.
Rep. Frank Pallone (D-N.J.), ranking member of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, told POLITICO in an interview that he has started holding weekly calls with Amtrak officials and criticized their use of infrastructure funds.
And Gov. Phil Murphy, who vowed he’d fix NJ Transit “if it kills me,” said at a news conference that “this must be fixed” and that “people don’t care” why it happened.
“Amtrak needs to be held accountable,” Rep. Tom Kean Jr. (R-N.J.) said in an interview. “This hurts people’s time with family, and it hurts property values for too many of my constituents. The response so far has been absolutely unacceptable.”
Problems continued in July, when New Jersey commuter trains lost air conditioning for days and passengers faced more cancellations as temperatures regularly soared above 90 degrees.
“This reminds me of the summer of hell in 2017 when the transit system in New York City reached a tipping point of unreliability and overcrowding,” said Kate Slevin, executive vice president of the nonprofit Regional Plan Association. “This feels like the Northeast Corridor’s version of that summer with unpredictability, unreliability, the age of the infrastructure and the system really showing itself in a very visible way to riders.”
The White House is aware of the issues, said Amtrak Board of Directors Chair Anthony Coscia.
“They’ve not only noticed, but they have been very much in touch on almost a daily basis with both our CEO and myself about making sure that something is done about this,” Coscia said in June.
Buttigieg is “closely tracking and engaged on the issues” plaguing the Northeast Corridor this summer, a DOT spokesperson said in a statement. DOT personnel are participating in inspections of Amtrak infrastructure and NJ Transit equipment, including those that occurred earlier this week.
Still, even with billions of dollars in new investment, “upgrades cannot happen overnight on an incredibly active rail corridor, and long-term funding and bipartisan support from the federal government remain necessary to move improvements forward,” the spokesperson said.
The Metropolitan Transportation Authority, which serves New York and Connecticut and is the nation’s largest public transit network, has also seen weather-related challenges this summer, though not to the same degree as Amtrak and NJ Transit. Jamie Torres-Springer, MTA’s president of construction and development, warned earlier this summer that rail tracks, power systems and switches are vulnerable to high temperatures and that trains would travel at reduced speeds.
The Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority, which serves the nation’s capital, is also feeling the effects of its hottest summer on record, highlighted by a “heat kink” in the tracks near Reagan National Airport that caused delays for the system in July.
The Northeast Corridor setbacks have come at a time when things had been looking up for Amtrak as it worked to capitalize on Biden’s push to grow the rail system with more routes stopping in new cities for economic and climate benefits.
In addition to its laundry list of planned construction projects due to get a boost from more than $32 billion in anticipated federal infrastructure funds, Amtrak will benefit from recently-secured funding for a signature Gateway tunnel project to build a second rail connection under the Hudson River between New Jersey and New York City.
But there’s some concern about the pace at which federal dollars are being spent and how Amtrak is balancing that vision with the need to ensure its existing service can continue operating at a high caliber. The Northeast Corridor alone has a repair backlog of over $100 billion.
Even with the federal boost, transit systems are facing funding strains. The MTA will no longer see a projected $15 billion after New York Gov. Kathy Hochul indefinitely paused a congestion pricing plan in June, and House Republicans are looking to cut Amtrak funding by 12 percent.
Still, officials across the region are hopeful that if the rail network can overcome the recent speed bumps, planned improvement projects can unlock smoother service in the future.
“Train service is permanently attractive,” said Adie Tomer, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution focused on infrastructure policy. “The only thing holding back Amtrak will always be the quality of its service.”