A chunk of debris that glanced off a Long Island Rail Road train running through the East River Tunnel last week — shutting down service for an hour and a half — came from another LIRR train, transit officials say.
As previously reported by the Daily News, LIRR Train 613 was traveling toward Penn Station in Tube No. 4 when it struck a piece of metal. The train was able to continue into the terminal, but dozens of other LIRR trains were rerouted or canceled while Amtrak and MTA work crews inspected the train and tracks for more than an hour.
The mysterious debris had initially been reported by Amtrak officials — in both internal and external communications — as a suspected piece of an Amtrak passenger train.
In statements to The News last week, both railroads said the debris was likely an errant part of an Amtrak Viewliner — a low-slung passenger car common to the federal railway’s east-coast lines.
On Tuesday, however, Amtrak — which owns and maintains the four-tube tunnel connecting Queens to Penn Station — noted in a newsletter “the piece of debris came from an LIRR train that was later found to be missing part of its hatch.”
Amtrak spokesman Jason Abrams clarified to The News that the piece of metal, roughly the size of a desk, was part of an access panel for the air conditioning system on a passenger car.
“We went through our fleet, and didn’t find any missing,” he said.
According to Abrams, LIRR was then notified. The Amtrak spokesman said LIRR officials found a train with a missing panel and notified Amtrak last week.
MTA spokesman Tim Minton confirmed on Tuesday that work crews at the LIRR had identified an M7 car missing a 6-by-2 foot panel covering the train’s rooftop HVAC system.
The car, which had its air conditioning unit replaced Aug. 28 — 12 days before the tunnel incident — did travel through the East River Tunnel on the morning of the debris-strike, Sept. 9.
The cover “appears to have been left behind,” Minton said, who added the situation was “exceedingly rare.”
The question of who lost the errant panel comes amid tensions between the two railroads — Amtrak, which owns and maintains the tunnel, and LIRR, whose trains constitute the vast majority of traffic through it.
In recent months, long-distance Amtrak trains have been sharing tubes in the four-track tunnel with LIRR’s commuter trains, an arrangement necessitated by a long-term overhaul of Tube No. 2, typically reserved for Amtrak travel. Officials with LIRR have lamented the arrangement, arguing reduced train capacity both increases the likelihood of delays and makes it harder to reroute trains around incidents.
One day after Train 613 struck the itinerant LIRR access panel, service in Tube No. 4 was again delayed after Amtrak Train 2151 reported a minor collision inside the tunnel. Service in that case was restored in roughly 90 minutes.
Tube No. 2 is expected to be shut down for eight more months to rebuild after damage from Hurricane Sandy and from routine water incursion. A 13-month shutdown of Tube No. 1 is planned when Tube No. 2 reopens.
