Amtrak service between New York Penn Station and New Rochelle is scheduled to be restored Wednesday afternoon, following a transformer fire Tuesday that halted trains on their tracks.
Work crews were making emergency track repairs to the Hell Gate Line Wednesday morning, and Amtrak was hoping to restore service by 2 p.m., officials from the federal passenger railroad said in a statement.
“Amtrak is communicating directly with impacted customers about this service interruption and offering options for rebooking their travel plans,” the statement added.
An MTA spokesperson said Metro-North Railroad was still cross-honoring Amtrak tickets on its New Haven Line, and would until service was restored.
Service was suspended on Amtrak’s Hell Gate Line connecting Penn Station to points north Tuesday after an oil-cooled electrical transformer in the Bronx caught fire around 2 p.m.
Amid current area drought conditions that have seen scores of recent brush fires, the transformer blaze spread to brush along the tracks and a nearby parking lot, requiring 60 FDNY personnel to bring it under control.
“It took us quite a while to extinguish that fire,” FDNY Chief of Operations Kevin Woods said late Tuesday.
“We had to have all train traffic stopped,” Wood said. “We had to have [power removed from] the overhead catenary wires. We needed power also removed from the transformer.”
FDNY teams were simultaneously combating a massive warehouse fire nearby, about a quarter mile away. Woods said the blazes were “two separate and distinct fires,” but that an investigation was ongoing to determine if they were related.
“It was a very, very heavy fire in both the [warehouse] and the transformer,” Woods said.
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