Amtrak’s NE Corridor Power Supply Is Ancient and Failing

At least ten times in the past two months, tens of thousands of people had their days ruined by a failure of one of the most fundamental pieces of infrastructure in America: the electrical system that powers Amtrak and New Jersey Transit trains on the Northeast Corridor. Stranded riders were furious. Amtrak and New Jersey pointed fingers. The whole region was left wondering how this could happen to the transportation backbone of the densest part of the country. How could the one piece of passenger rail in this country that more or less, kind of, approximately, works as a business — the closest thing we have to a modern electric European railway — break down so often?

The answer is likely a toxic combination of deferred maintenance on a fraying and ancient power supply. The catenary — the overhead arrangement of poles and wires that supplies electricity to moving trains — on the Northeast Corridor was inherited from the Pennsylvania Railroad, which went out of business in 1970. Most of the catenary system is about 80 years old. Fifty years ago, federal officials were already saying that they needed to replace it wholesale with a modern setup, only to shelve the program amid budget overruns. Attempts at incremental upgrades, in turn, have been beset by mismanagement and poor accounting at Amtrak. To make things all the more maddening, the decrepit power system is also one of the biggest reasons that Amtrak’s bullet train, the Acela, is so slow.

Amtrak’s own regulatory filing from last year states that not one inch of the overhead wiring between Washington, D.C., and New York’s Pennsylvania Station — zero percent — is in a state of good repair. On a scale of zero to five, with zero signifying that the system is so decrepit that it cannot function, Amtrak rates the electrical system a 1. In that document, called the Infrastructure Asset Line Appendices, Amtrak’s Electric Traction unit, which manages the catenary, acknowledges that it’s getting worse: Electric Traction “acknowledges that preventive maintenance activities are not consistently completed due to limited resource availability and a need to provide ET staff to support other asset classes … or capital projects. This has resulted in a growing maintenance backlog, which is becoming a major priority.” That backlog, which measured less than $100 million in 2018 according to Amtrak charts, now sits at an estimated $829 million. Another $2.9 billion is needed to replace or repair poles and other structures that hold the wires. Amtrak’s figures say that each of the three units in its Electric Traction division is understaffed, and the group that keeps up the wiring in the mid-Atlantic states is in the worst shape. (A spokesman for the railroad has hired more than 300 trainees across the division.)

“They’ve been reduced to a patch type of program — that’s what they say here,” said Joe Clift, a transit advocate who previously served as Long Island Rail Road’s chief of planning, when reviewing the documents. “If they have a reactive approach to maintenance, then you know two things: that they’re spending the least amount in the near term, and at the same time, guaranteeing service outages that really screw the customer.” He added: “Because it’s the trunk line of the New Jersey system, everybody gets hit.”

That lack of planning and maintenance, said a source who is knowledgeable about the extent of the problem, extends to Penn Station, where power went out several times over the past several weeks. Amtrak is backing an unfunded $16 billion program to build a giant new extension of the rail hub immediately to the south of the existing station but has no plans to upgrade what’s there now. “You’re going to do this $16 billion thing and just leave all these shitty tracks and signals and catenary in place,” said a person familiar with the plans. “As far as I know, nothing has changed with that.”

The wiring that Amtrak and New Jersey Transit rely on is a bespoke system that was built by the Pennsylvania Railroad nearly a century ago, then run by its successor Penn Central, then handed over to the public after the railroad went broke and was nationalized. In the 1970s, the federal government plotted an aggressive set of upgrades meant to revive train service along the Northeast Corridor by substantially increasing its speed and reliability. They identified several major problems, including — according to a report completed in 1975 that I obtained as part of a fellowship investigating rail modernization at New York University — that, unlike those on high-speed rail systems elsewhere, the wires are not constantly tensioned. Instead they just hang.

That has a threefold effect. First, it makes the whole system vulnerable to heat, because as the temperature goes up, the wires expand and sag. When they do, Amtrak and NJ Transit have to slow their trains down. Second, the drooping power lines increase the risk that the wires get tangled up in the pantographs, the linkages atop of the trains that slide along the catenary and draw power from it. If that happens, a moving train can rip the whole business down, causing major damage. (Amtrak and NJT have traded blame over who’s responsible for snagged wires.) Those reliability and speed worries are a big reason why the Connecticut Department of Transportation and the MTA spent $912 million on a couple of projects between 1993 and 2021 to methodically replace all of the wiring between Pelham and New Haven with tensioned wires. So far, this summer, Metro-North’s New Haven Line has avoided the meltdowns plaguing the other side of the Hudson. 

Third, the old catenary limits the speed of trains, even at middling temperatures. As many Amtrak observers have noted over the years, our “high-speed” rail from New York to Washington, the Acela, is far slower than the bullet trains that other countries run.  That 1975 document determined that the catenary we have on that line is  good up to about 110 miles per hour, well below the corridor’s then-target speed of 150 miles per hour. “Above 110 mph, the only way to obtain good and stable dynamic characteristics is through a constant tension system,” the engineers wrote. An updated assessment in 1986 found that the wiring between Washington and New York was “in relatively good condition” and shows that Amtrak had managed to use tweaks and upgrades to reliably squeeze speeds up to 125 miles per hour out of the system. But it reported that faster speeds would require major upgrades.

Those upgrades proposed in the 1970s were included in the new power system Amtrak built northeast of New York, between New Haven and Boston, in the 1990s. It took Amtrak two decades to get the White House and Congress to fund its construction, and until then the line ran on pokey diesel-powered trains. The tensioned cables overhead let the Acela trains race at up to 150 mph on stretches through New England, although they slow down through Connecticut owing principally to sharp curves. Those same trains could likely reach 150 miles an hour for most of the run to Washington, which is straighter, with a new catenary. Instead, they are throttled to a peak of about 125 to 135 miles per hour by the fragility of the wires above. A colleague of mine at NYU, Alon Levy, calculates that upgrading the archaic power system alone could cut ten or 11 minutes off each trip between New York and Washington. That would mean an Acela trip journey making the usual stops — Newark, Philadelphia, Wilmington, Baltimore — down to about two hours and 50 minutes, finally getting it below the long-sought benchmark of three hours. That’s fast enough to finally get the Acela’s top speed into the same Zip Code, if not the same ballpark, as the EuroStar that links London to Paris, topping out at 186 miles per hour. Put it together with greater reliability and lower maintenance costs, and it’s unquestionably worth doing.

We have, it turns out, paid for this upgrade, or at least a partial one. Despite a slew of attempts by conservative lawmakers and the Bush administration to privatize the railroad, Amtrak finally scored the funds from Congress to upgrade a segment of the wiring between New York and Washington in 2011. The $450 million grant — part of the economic stimulus package backed by then-President Barack Obama — was supposed to pay for replacing a 23-mile stretch of the Northeast Corridor between Trenton and New Brunswick. But the program was a mismanaged disaster that resulted in two probes by Amtrak’s inspector general, including one that determined that an unnamed Amtrak executive engaged in “improper hiring, indications of favoritism, conflicts of interest, and gross mismanagement of resources.” Amtrak cut back the tensioned catenary program from the 23 miles to 14 miles, and a subsequent report in 2017 by the IG showed that only seven miles’ worth was actually built.

In the aftermath of this summer’s meltdowns, Amtrak and New Jersey governor Phil Murphy announced they would step up inspections and maintenance of both trains and power systems and would attempt to find new grant money to finally replace and upgrade the catenary. “The performance of late, across the board, has been unacceptable,” Murphy told reporters in Newark on June 27. “People don’t care why it happened. They want to get home.” Amtrak declined to comment for this story but pointed to statements issued by railroad executives, including a letter from its president, Roger Harris, to Northeast Corridor customers after the recent outages. It reads, in part: “We are reviewing each incident with the goal of improving future travel, while continuing to advance unprecedented investments that are modernizing and strengthening the NEC.”

But 50-odd years after the federal government took over the Northeast Corridor, and even though the Gateway Tunnel has finally been funded, there’s still no holistic overhaul plan for the busiest railway in North America. Instead, it’s piecemeal and patchwork. The Federal Railroad Administration’s 2024 Northeast Corridor Project Inventory includes a $611 million proposal to replace — but not upgrade — the overhead wiring from the New Brunswick to Newark, and even that project is $101 million short of full funding. “The frequent inspections are reactive, not proactive,” said Liam Blank, a former staffer at the MTA’s Permanent Citizens Advisory Committee, who’s the author of an extensive report on Penn Station modernization for transit group Tri-State Transportation Campaign. “They should be focusing on the long-term answers, which is replacing,” he continued. “Without the actual solutions, upgrading the catenary and the pantographs, you’re not actually fixing the problem.”