At least three New York-bound trains got stuck Tuesday morning after a power transmission failure stranded commuters in a tunnel under the Hudson River.
A power issue at Hackensack Substation 42 — a 1932-vintage facility located near the tunnel mouth on Tonnelle Ave. in North Bergen — caused an outage between 9:20 and 10:01 a.m., an Amtrak spokesperson told the Daily News.
At least three trains — Amtrak trains 2152 and 642 and NJ Trainst 3830 — were caught in the outage, unable to get between Midtown and New Jersey.
Amtrak, the federal railroad operator, owns and operates the former Pennsylvania Railroad tracks used by both Amtrak and NJ Transit trains.
The Midtown meltdown came as an early-morning motorcycle crash turned Lincoln Tunnel traffic into a morass during the a.m. rush, leaving many Jersey residents few options to get to work in the city.
One passenger on NJ Transit train 3830 told The News that they boarded the train around 9:15 a.m., after their New-York bound NJ Transit bus detoured from the Lincoln Tunnel to the Secaucus Junction train station in the New Jersey Meadowlands.
The passenger said the train died sometime after entering the North River tunnel — which brings trains under Union City, N.J. and the Hudson River.
The train crew blamed Amtrak’s power wired over the intercom, the passenger said, before telling those aboard that they would be switching the train’s dual-mode locomotive to diesel power in order to reverse out of the tunnel, back into New Jersey.
When power was restored several minutes later, the passenger said, the train entered the tunnel and reached Penn under electrical power.
NJ Transit spokesman Jim Smith confirmed that train 3830 backed out of the tunnel under diesel power, and said the train ended up being delayed into Penn by 50 minutes.
Amtrak’s aging infrastructure, much of it inherited from the now-defunct Pennsylvania Rail Road, and NJ Transit’s aging rolling stock have both led to a summer of hell for Garden State commuters, with frequent failures of both signaling and traction power systems — often multiple times per week.
The two railroads pledged in June to conduct more frequent inspections of both power lines and the train pantographs that collect traction power. Officials from both also said they would be seeking grants to update substations like the one that failed Tuesday.
Substation 42 is currently slated to get a new control room by 2025, a project that’s expected to cost some $17 million, according to the Northeast Corridor capital investment plan.
While the grant specifies the new control room should have the capacity to handle additional substation power transformers, the modernization is not expected to update the facility’s current power systems.
Earlier this year, four power transmission circuits were replaced in the Kearny, N.J.’s Substation 41, which provides power to a section of track deeper in the Meadowlands.
With John Annese
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