(The following story by Tom Feeney appeared on the Star-Ledger website on January 4.)
NEWARK, N.J. — The new year is off to a bad start for mass transit riders.
Tens of thousands of commut ers faced delays of an hour or more during the morning commute yesterday because of equipment problems on the NJ Transit and PATH systems.
The problems came just a day after an unrelated equipment problem caused long delays for NJ Transit commuters coming home from New York during the evening rush hour, NJ Transit spokesman Dan Stessel said.
Yesterday’s problems started at 6:20 a.m., when an overhead wire fell onto a Northeast Corridor train just outside Newark. Service on three NJ Transit lines that run through Newark Penn Station — the Northeast Corridor, the North Jersey Coast and the Raritan Val ley lines — was disrupted for most of the morning, Stessel said.
Forty-three trains were delayed and 16 were canceled, affecting about 55,000 NJ Transit riders, Stessel said.
“It certainly was one of those mornings,” he said. “The incidents conspired to make for significant delays and inconvenience for our customers.”
The tracks, wires and other infrastructure along the Northeast Corridor are owned by Amtrak. NJ Transit pays to run its trains on the line. An Amtrak spokesman, Cliff Cole, said the downed wire was repaired by late afternoon. Amtrak would not be able to say until today what caused the wire to fall, he said.
The PATH problems were not related to the downed wire on the Northeast Corridor. They were caused by three separate fires, according to Steve Coleman, a spokesman for the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which operates PATH.
A malfunctioning third rail caused an electrical fire along the tracks near Hoboken at about 7:40 a.m., Coleman said. When crews fixed that problem and restored power to the line, another electrical fire broke out at the same spot.
By 9:30 a.m., the power was restored and the PATH trains were running again, Coleman said.
Then, at 10:30 a.m., fire engulfed an empty Port Authority warehouse near the tracks at Hoboken. That fire closed the PATH lines for an hour and 20 minutes.
New York Waterway, the ferry operator, carried several hundred more passengers than usual yesterday morning because of the PATH problems, spokesman Pat Smith said.
PATH trains were back on schedule by yesterday afternoon.
The Wednesday evening delays on the NJ Transit trains were caused by a dangling wire just west of the tunnel that carries rail traffic beneath the Hudson River into New York, Stessel said. Those delays averaged about 30 minutes, he said.