Bad Day for NJ Transit Commuters

Downed overhead wires halted train service and caused lengthy delays Tuesday for morning commuters on NJ Transit's heavily traveled Northeast Corridor line.

By the afternoon, NJ Transit said train service would be on or close to schedule for the evening commute. Cliff Cole, a spokesman for Amtrak, which owns the tracks, said the last of four tracks affected by the problem had been put back into service.

The problem began about 7:40 a.m. when overhead lines came down, halting an 11-car train headed to New York and forcing the passengers to move to another train. The downed wires in Metuchen caused delays of up to an hour on the busy Northeast Corridor Line.

NJ Transit's inbound service from some stations to New York was temporarily suspended, and service was delayed up to an hour in both directions between Trenton and New York. Amtrak also experienced delays up to an hour.

Cole said Amtrak did not know yet what caused the wires to come down.

Electrical problems, extreme weather and other mishaps have bedeviled New Jersey commuters recently. Since the end of June, nearly 20 service disruptions of varying severity on NJ Transit lines have been reported.

Among the disruptions were three major delays within a week in August -- two due to switching problems and one caused by a train derailment near the Hudson River tunnel into New York. There was a power outage inside the tunnel in September and a disabled train outside the tunnel two weeks ago.

Hurricane Irene in late August and a freak late-October snowstorm also took their toll, forcing the suspension of service on some lines for days or even weeks in the case of the Port Jervis line. In nine reported instances since the beginning of July, trains struck and killed people on the tracks, leading to service delays.

NJ Transit spokesman John Durso Jr. said that the agency's on-time performance rate has been nearly 95 percent over the past year "despite the impact of a devastating hurricane, a crippling October snowstorm and other incidents beyond NJ Transit's control."

NJ Transit operates the nation's largest statewide public transportation system with nearly 900,000 weekday trips on its rail and bus lines.