Starting today, and for the next three years (at a minimum) Amtrak is cancelling 25% of the daily trains between Penn Station and Albany unnecessarily, with connections to Canada requiring additional waits of up to 90 minutes. Also gone without cause are 10% of the LIRR’s peak a.m. inbound rush trains to Penn, again, for a minimum of three years.
This is outrageous and the railroad must be overruled by President Trump and Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy and New York politicians, particularly Republicans who have good relations with the White House, have to raise the alarm.
Reps. Elise Stefanik and Mike Lawler, whose upstate and Hudson Valley constituents are losing out, should fight this. The same for Nassau County Executive Bruce Blakeman, who must defend his commuters. That the three are possible gubernatorial contenders is even more on point as this has statewide implications, stretching from Long Island to upstate.
Amtrak’s excuse for killing so many trains for so many New Yorkers on some of the busiest routes in the country is that the federal railway monopoly will be repairing parts of the East River Tunnel. That $1.6 billion fully-funded project should proceed, but Amtrak is refusing to use the worldwide standard method of doing such work on nights and weekends, keeping all normal service running, well, normally.
Amtrak claims that they can’t rebuild the tubes under the river without having a total shutdown for at least three years (and knowing Amtrak, that will clearly take longer) and we believe them. Their technological innovation plateaued in 1910 when the tunnel was dug by their ancestor, the private Pennsylvania Railroad.
But there are plenty of others who can achieve this. The oldest rail tunnel in the world, a London Tube section dating from 1863, was completely renovated — including the complex task of changing the old-fashion ballasted track to modern direct rail fixation — using this repair-in-place approach. During the daytime, those Underground trains ran on their regular schedule.
But this is too difficult for Amtrak to understand. Trump and Duffy just fired Amtrak CEO Steve Gardner, who championed the retrograde approach and always got his way from Amtrak Joe, the president who coddled the railroad instead of making it perform better.
This wouldn’t be happening if the now headless Amtrak was a private company. No for-profit enterprise would cut off 25% or 10% of its customers for years when there is an alternative.
And besides reducing options for New Yorkers, the remaining Penn service for LIRR, Amtrak and NJTransit will all be at great risk because instead of having the four East River tubes, there will only be three. So gone will be any operational flexibility to recover from a simple or routine equipment or infrastructure problem, from a stalled train to a broken rail to a faulty signal.
The shutdown of the tunnel was to start today, but it has been pushed to May 9, as Amtrak is waiting for the opening of the new Eastbound Re-Route at the busy Harold Interlocking in Queens. That project, along with the Westbound Bypass, will improve train movements, but having one of the East River tubes under demotion for years is still the crucial missing link. The full shutdown must never happen.
The politicians should ignore the recycled excuses from Amtrak’s government relations people. The politicians should order Amtrak to follow what the Brits did.
