Top officials at Amtrak and NJ Transit told Assembly lawmakers Thursday that infrastructure upgrades would require closing some tracks during service. (Photo by Spencer Platt/Getty Images)
NJ Transit and Amtrak are discussing reducing service overnight and on weekends to allow work crews more time to repair and upgrade infrastructure that officials blamed for service disruptions this summer, top agency officials told Assembly lawmakers Thursday.
The hearing before the Assembly’s transportation committee came as officials seek to improve system reliability following the second worst “summer of hell” under Gov. Phil Murphy, one that saw on-time performance fall to near record lows for the administration and led to 1,820 canceled trains.
“To be clear, this is incredibly important work, and the stakes are high. It’s almost impossible to overstate the importance of the Northeast Corridor, not only to the millions of commuters and intercity rail customers who rely on it every day, but to our national economy,” said NJ Transit CEO Kevin Corbett. “As one of the largest economic markets in the world, the northeast is key to our country’s international competitiveness.”
According to Corbett, agencies boosted inspections and other maintenance work in response to summer disruptions, replacing more than 2,000 components in overhead lines that power NJ Transit trains and inspecting the 240 miles of track that run between Trenton and New York Penn Station.
But Corbett and Amtrak CEO Stephen Gardner said other needed maintenance work would require closing portions of track along the Northeast Corridor during service hours, warning work crews had too little time to make needed upgrades or repairs with operations at full capacity.
“Much of the work simply can’t be done efficiently while the railroad is running at today’s service levels,” Gardner told the committee. “In particular, Amtrak will require longer work periods overnight and on weekends, sometimes when no trains are operating, and extended periods when individual tracks will need to be out of service to get the work done.”
Officials were still working out the timing of track closures, Gardner said, but he acknowledged temporary closures would cause some pain in the short term.
Message for poor NJ Transit riders: Fixes are coming … eventually
Amtrak owns tracks and other infrastructure used by NJ Transit trains on the Northeast Corridor, the busiest commuter rail line on the continent, and the state transportation agency pays roughly $200 million a year to Amtrak to use tracks, overhead wires, and other parts of its network.
Much of that infrastructure is aged — in some cases more than a century old — and has grown increasingly unreliable over decades of disinvestment, Corbett and Gardner told the committee.
“I want to remind everyone that we are relying on ancient infrastructure that’s grossly inadequate in capacity for the volume of trains that we operate on what is, in fact, the busiest mainline railroad in all of North America,’ Gardner said.
They urged lawmakers to continue investing in capital improvements, noting state matching funds are key to securing competitive federal grants that, at present, provide four federal dollars for every one spent by states.
State matching funds were key to securing billions in federal dollars made available under the infrastructure law President Joe Biden signed in 2021, they said.
“In addition to New Jersey Transit’s regular investments, having this opportunity to take us as partners to put up 20% and get 80% back is what’s allowing, literally, New Jersey to be experiencing what’s going to be well over $10 billion in net federal investment here just in the next decade,” Gardner said.
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