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David Furst: It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. I'm David Furst, WNYC's Weekend Edition host, filling in for Brian. Here's something you may be very familiar with if you are stuck in one of the Amtrak and New Jersey Transit summer meltdowns. America's busiest rail corridor is in a state of disrepair. We dive now into the crumbling infrastructure of Amtrak's Northeast Corridor.

Our guest is Nolan Hicks, who covers city agencies, politics, and transit, and now contributes to New York Magazine. He's the author of a new piece in Curbed that offers a closer look at Amtrak's longstanding problems. As Nolan reports, according to Amtrak's own regulatory filing from last year, it states that not 1 inch of the overhead wiring between Washington, DC, and New York's Pennsylvania station. 0% is in a state of good repair. This has led to at least 10 major power failures in the past two months, stranding tens of thousands of passengers. Nolan Hicks joins us now. Welcome to WNYC.

Nolan Hicks: It's a pleasure to be here.

David Furst: Listeners, we can take your calls. If you are an Amtrak or New Jersey Transit commuter along the Northeast Corridor, you can help Nolan Hicks report this story, especially if you were traveling during one of those recent electrical failures. Have the infrastructure issues left you stranded? Call us, 212-433-WNYC. That's 212-433-9692. Nolan, this is a problem that has a lot to do with what you refer to as a fraying and ancient power supply. We'll talk about the critical failures in this infrastructure. By way of background, can you give us a sense of how it actually works? How are trains along the Northeast Corridor electrified?

Nolan Hicks: Sure. If you think about the subways here in the city or if you're a Long Island Rail Road customer, if you're riding an LIRR train into the city, all the trains are electric. They have been electric for a century. They've been electric for a century for safety reasons and pollution reasons inside of the stations themselves, but starting in about different pieces of the network at various points in time.

From about 1900 to about 1940, just before the war breaks out, there's a concerted effort to electrify the system. The commuter railroads coming in and out of Penn Station and Grand Central Station. There's two methods by which you power a train. One of which is by overhead wire, which is the method that's become increasingly common around the world. If you go to France or if you go to Britain, most of the railroads in Britain.

If you go to Germany, if you go to Italy, if you look at how the trains are powered, they're powered by overhead wires. If you look at the subway system in places that tend to be more in tunnels, you'll see a lot of third rail. You're told never touch the third rail. That's because there's hundreds of volts of electricity traveling down that third rail to power your subway car. The lines over the trains are even more powerful, depending on what point of the network you're in.

They're carrying tens of thousands of volts of electricity to move these trains at extraordinarily high speeds from Trenton into the city to make life in the Northeast as we know it possible and practicable. This system, particularly between New York and Washington as you said, is old. It's about a century old. They finished it just around the outbreak of the Second World War and it's a bespoke system.

It was built by the old Pennsylvania Railroad. It was inherited by Penn Central. Then when Penn Central collapses, it's inherited by the federal government. As Penn Central collapses and as the federal government takes over in the 1970s, there are a series of studies that are commissioned that say that the system is archaic, it's a pain to keep up, it's going to slow trains down, and we should do something about it. This is 50 years ago.

Of course, in true fashion, it's cut from the program, the first of the many modernization programs in the Northeast Corridor because of budget reasons. It resurfaces about a decade later when Ronald Reagan is president and it remains unfunded. Then actually, ironically, George Herbert Walker Bush, who for all of his going to Texas and being the congressman from Houston was actually a New England boy, puts money in the federal budget towards the very end of his administration to build the electrical wiring from New Haven to Boston.

I want everyone to keep that fact in their mind for a second because the system from New Haven to Boston is a modern system. What makes it a modern system are two points. One, the type of electricity it's driving down the wires. Two, the fact that the wires remain under tension. If it gets hot outside, they don't sag. If it gets cold outside, they don't get tense. There is a system that keeps the wires at a constant state of tension.

That means the trains can run at full speed no matter the temperature, grabbing power via-- there's a metal structure that extends from the top of the train to the wires. They call it the pantograph. That's how the power gets from the wires to the train to drive the train's motors and they send the train forward. Now, keep that image in your mind. South of Penn Station is the old legacy bespoke Pennsylvania Railroad power system.

It operates at a different power frequency, which is important to an extent, but not really for this conversation. It means that everything's a little more complicated than it should be in terms of the engineering. The second piece of it is that the wires are not constantly tensioned. When it gets hot, they sag. When it gets cold, they get tight, and it makes it harder for the trains to grab power from the lines.

David Furst: This is what we were dealing with very recently.

Nolan Hicks: Yes, this is exactly what we're dealing with. Each one of these incidents has a root cause and they're going to get to the root cause of it. If you talk to people who know this stuff, they will tell you sagging lines make those lines more vulnerable to getting caught in a pantograph and getting pulled down. It makes them more vulnerable to just falling in general. You need to keep up your system and they haven't kept up the system.

David Furst: Well, how far past its lifespan are we talking about for the system now that it's 2024?

Nolan Hicks: That's an excellent question. There's not really a great answer to it. If you take care of a system, you can keep it up for a long, long period of time. When you think about the subway system, just to use this as an example, the bulk of the subway system is powered by a signaling system. It controls how the trains move. It's an old mechanical system. It breaks a lot. If you take care of it, it still works, and it's still capable of pushing trains through every two to three minutes. That's an example of how infrastructure, when taken care of, can continue to do the bulk of what it needs to do. The overarching issue here is that we haven't taken care of it.

David Furst: You talk in the article about a growing maintenance backlog that Amtrak measured as less than $100 million back in 2018 to an estimated $829 million now. Talk about that. What specific factors have contributed to this dramatic increase in deferred maintenance?

Nolan Hicks: We're left with what the regulatory filings say. If you read the regulatory filings, you see a couple of points. One of which is that the maintenance backlog has been growing. Just to put this in another context, if you think about taking care of your house, right? If you don't take care of one thing, it becomes a little bit of an issue. If you take care of it pretty quickly, maybe it doesn't get so bad. If you don't take care of a couple of things and then you have this compounding effect. Does that make sense?

The state of good repair work and maintenance work is not something that works on a linear basis. It doesn't increase every year. If you stop doing it, the needs begin to escalate in almost an exponential fashion. They start falling behind for whatever reason in 2018, 2017, 2016. I actually have questions about the quality of the work that was being done before, but that's neither here nor there. It makes all the sense in the world that the needs would begin to escalate in almost an exponential fashion. Once you stop doing the work, it really builds up quickly.

David Furst: You report that each of the three units in Amtrak's electric traction division is understaffed.

Nolan Hicks: Yes.

David Furst: First of all, what does that division do? How is this staffing shortage impacting what's going on here and the ability to perform necessary maintenance and upgrades?

Nolan Hicks: One of the things they point to in these regulatory filings is that the short staffing means they can't get to the maintenance work that needs to get done. There's two factors. Then the second factor is they say that their staff is being diverted to work on major capital projects. If that sounds familiar to people who've ridden the subway system or remember the summer from hell in 2016 and 2017 when there was this giant backlog of maintenance in the subway system and there were all sorts of investigative reports.

The New York Times did a really exhaustive one. Basically, the MTA was put in a position by the political leadership of the state of robbing Peter to pay Paul. The politicians wanted big, fancy projects built. In order to get the big, fancy projects built, money and staff was basically taken from the upkeep of the system. That is what led to the summer of hell in 2016 and 2017 when the switches were failing and the signals were failing.

Everyone's getting from Midtown to Seventh Avenue in Brooklyn or whatever would take an hour instead of 30 minutes. That's basically the same thing that's happened here. They're short-staffed, so they can't get to the work as it's needed. Not only are they short-staffed, some of their staff is being diverted to handle these capital projects. Yes, it's contributed. In fact, if you look at the varying pieces of it, you can't come to any other conclusion that they just did not have the people. Beyond not having the people, we're diverting those people to doing other things.

David Furst: We are here with Nolan Hicks who covers city agencies, politics, and transit, and wrote about Amtrak for Curbed. We're taking your calls, 212-433-WNYC. That's 212-433-9692. Let's go to a call right now. This is Sue calling from Roselle, New Jersey. Good morning.

Sue: Hello?

David Furst: Hey, good morning. Welcome to The Brian Lehrer Show. Did you have a question about transit?

Sue: Yes, a comment and a couple of questions actually.

David Furst: Sure.

Sue: I'm a teacher. I've been a public school teacher in New Jersey for 26 years. Because the Christie administration passed the New Jersey First Law, I'm required to live in the state of New Jersey. Unfortunately, my partner works in New York City. Because I can't leave the city or can't leave New Jersey, she has to live with me and has to take New Jersey Transit. The experience for these past couple of months, it's just been horrific. There are days that she wasn't able to get home and she had to spend money to sleep in a hotel. There were many times, I had to drive all over the state to pick her up.

David Furst: Yes, this is no joke.

Sue: I also have a job. It's not like I'm just waiting around to pick her up at whatever train stations she's able to go to. At the same time, as New Jersey requires me by law to live in the state of New Jersey, they're making it impossible to have any kind of a normal life because we can't just live in New York City, where her commute would no longer be so hellish. To compound this, and I haven't heard you guys mentioned this, isn't there a looming possibility of a strike amongst New Jersey Transit workers that can make this even worse?

David Furst: Sue, thank you so much for that call and really explaining the level of frustration and just how difficult this is. What about her comments?

Nolan Hicks: Everyone in the city experienced this seven or eight years ago when the subway system was in free fall and people in New Jersey are having roughly the exact same experience. One of my colleagues at NYU, Eric Goldwyn, who runs the Transit Costs Project, and they're examining how we build things and how we can build things better in America. That's his proposal. He was coming back and his train got stuck in Trenton. They ended up having to get a car and taking a car from Trenton to New York City, which is no cheap endeavor. Yes, it's really terrible.

David Furst: Can you talk a little bit about the blame game that was going on between Amtrak and New Jersey Transit, the Twitter back and forth that was happening saying, "Hey, it's New Jersey Transit's trains that were stuck," "Oh, it's because the overhead infrastructure was melting."

Nolan Hicks: If the car runs out of gas, whose fault is it?

David Furst: Don't blame me.

Nolan Hicks: It is that simple. It's an argument about nothing, but it allows everyone to keep pointing the fingers and dance around the real issue, which is that the overhead wiring is falling apart. As long as the overhead wiring is falling apart and as long as they don't fix it to deal with the heat, we're going to keep running into these issues. As a comparison, the MTA and the Connecticut Department of Transportation own the New Haven line, which is the new Northeast Corridor from New Haven to about Pelham, and then it splits.

Half of it runs to Penn Station, which is the Amtrak piece of it. The other half continues into Grand Central, which is the MTA piece of it. It took them the better part of three decades and it took them the better part of $900 million, but they fixed the wiring on the New Haven line. As a point of comparison, the New Haven line has not had the outages this year that New Jersey Transit has had. Sometimes you have to spend the money to make the system work.

David Furst: The number to call, 212-433-WNYC. That's 212-433-9692. We have several callers right now. Maria, calling from Flatiron, good morning. Thanks for joining us. Do you have a question?

Maria: Good morning. Yes. Well, an observation and a question. I went from Penn Station up to Boston a few years ago. It was during a heatwave. I believe it was 106 degrees in Boston. They explained to the riders that they had to slow the train down significantly because the tracks get compromised in the great heat. If you could explain that to me, do they actually warp or are in danger of derailment or I don't know? It took us several hours more to get there. It was the wires, I understand, but the heat in the rails is a mystery to me.

Nolan Hicks: Well, wires and rails are made of roughly the same thing. Metal under heat does things. It can expand a little bit. It can warp a little bit. Sometimes it does result in the train slowing down. Those issues are far more common on parts of the track that are poorly maintained or not maintained to the same level as other parts of the network. Along the Northeast Corridor, all the trackage is required to hit certain specifications because of how quickly the trains run. Your maintenance requirements and the quality of the materials that you're using, a whole bunch of other things are dictated by the allowed speed on those tracks.

Trackage where you're typically only running freight trains, there might be one of the old Amtrak diesels that runs once a day. Think of getting from New York to Montreal. This has been constantly disrupted by problems with the quality of the track, particularly in the heat. That is very poorly maintained track. Amtrak has been absolutely yelling at one of the Canadian freight railroads to fix it. The Canadian freight railroads are doing whatever they want to do, and they have, and that's why it's been very infrequent.

The service has actually, I think, been suspended for most of the summer. Just as an example of this. Along the Northeast Corridor, where the steel is tied into concrete and the quality of the materials is very high and the amount of maintenance done is quite frequent or should be, disruptions because of warping of the metal of the rails should be fairly infrequent. I'd actually be curious as to what-- if you can remember exactly where the slowdown was or people-- I know it was a several years ago, but any other details, I think, would be very interesting on that.

David Furst: Maria, you're still with us?

Maria: I am, yes. I'm sorry. I can't recall, but I know it was outside of New York. I really can't recall, but they did say-- I think it was on approach to Boston. I don't know. Why can't there be better communication, just curious, between the people maintaining the rails? How often are they, in fact, maintaining? Is it state to state? Whose jurisdiction is the replacing of the rails?

Nolan Hicks: It's Amtrak's, except between New Haven and the state line, which points the Connecticut Department of Transportation but handled by the MTA. Then between the state line and Grand Central on that piece of it, which is the MTA's and then it gets complicated. The Northeast Corridor is all of Amtrak's with the exception of New Haven to New York City where it is mostly not Amtrak's, except for the portions of it that are Amtrak's if that makes sense.

David Furst: Okay, I'm taking notes here. [chuckles] I'm trying to keep this all in line.

Nolan Hicks: Yes. I'm sorry.

David Furst: We have a few more questions we still have time for. Just getting back to the stakes a little bit here, frequent power failures have disrupted the commutes and the lives of tens of thousands of people. It affects all of us on an individual level, but what are the broader economic implications for disruptions like these in the region?

Nolan Hicks: Think about all the people who have to commute from New Jersey to the city to do their jobs. Think about everyone who needs to commute from New York City to Jersey to see their families. Think about everyone who needs to get between New York City and Philadelphia for business or New York City and Baltimore, New York City and Washington, DC, for business.

The Acela claims something like 70% of the passenger trips are on Amtrak between New York City and Washington, DC, which is an extraordinarily high market share, but it means that whether it's finance, whether it's politics, whether it's media, whether it's all of the white-collar professions in the city are very dependent upon this corridor functioning and functioning properly.

David Furst: What happens next looking ahead?

Nolan Hicks: That's a great unanswered question.

David Furst: What long-term solutions do experts propose to prevent future power failures and slowdowns and disruptions? I'm looking long-term, but also right now. What could be done right now?

Nolan Hicks: Well, the governor, Phil Murphy, and Amtrak have promised they're going to step up inspections. They're going to try to step up the maintenance regime, all of which can't hurt, but the fundamental answer or the fundamental problem remains that the power system we're using is 100 years old that 50 years ago, they were thinking about ways to modernize it and to replace it. Very little of that work has been done.

The answer today is roughly the same answer that we had 50 years ago and just have never pulled off the shelf and built, which is the Northeast Corridor from Washington to New York City needs a modern power system that is designed with both the heat and the speeds that we need in mind instead of just continuing to use a thing that was a genius piece of engineering, but it was built for railroading 100 years ago when trains couldn't go 140 miles an hour or 150 miles an hour.

David Furst: Nolan, let's get to one more question. Let's hear from John in Sussex, New Jersey. Good morning.

John: Good morning. I was just wondering if there's any effort made to build a high-speed rail from basically Maine to Florida. Is there any effort or anything in the works?

David Furst: Well, that sounds nice. Nolan?

Nolan Hicks: You'll run into a lot of problems. That's about 1,500 miles of coastline to go from Portland to Miami. The answer is I think there are a lot of people who have dreamed of something like that. There is very little money to do something like that. More to the point, there's very little political appetite in a lot of those states to build something like this. By political appetite, I mean rail is controversial at best and not liked at worst.

David Furst: You have written that there's still no holistic overall plan for the Northeast Corridor. Just once again, why is it so challenging to develop and implement such a holistic plan and what do you think the chances are for improvements?

Nolan Hicks: It's a question of governance. Amtrak is an agency that is-- the pattern is, gets money, gets starved for 20 years, gets money, gets starved for 20 years, gets money, gets starved for 20 years. On top of that, you have a lot of commuter railroads that have, not in coordinated fashion, but in similar fashion, a little bit of money because things fall apart and then they get starved. A little bit of money and then things fall apart and then they get starved. A little bit of money and then things fall apart and they get starved.

You have two questions. One of which is you have a lot of disparate needs. You have a lack of funding. You have a lack of an overarching planning infrastructure. There's no singular entity in charge of making people do what they should do on the Northeast Corridor. Amtrak owns the tracks. Amtrak charges people for access to the tracks, but it's like an example. I think it was 20 or 25 years ago.

New Jersey Transit goes and buys a bunch of locomotive hold multi-levels, which are much slower in terms of acceleration than the M8s that Metro-North uses on the New Haven line. What that means is trip times got longer, but what that also means is that it's harder for Amtrak to run the service. Because if your train is slower, it needs up more capacity. You have all these knock-on effects.

There's no singular set of standards, there's no singular management entity, and there's no singular regulatory body in charge of overseeing the capital and the operations of the Northeast Corridor. Someone was telling me that, ironically, it's the most important rail corridor in America, but it also probably has the least amount of planning and actual supervision.

David Furst: Nolan, let's hear from Chuck in Manhattan calling in. Possibly a former Amtrak employee. Chuck, did you want to add some of your comments to this discussion?

Chuck: I think your guest is really being rude towards the railroad because I feel that Amtrak's in a position where they don't have constant funding source. Good example, if we had Kathy Hochul's program to charge cars in Manhattan as that example of dedicated funding source, then some of these legacy problems will not exist, and then furthermore is that beyond the Northeast Corridor, Amtrak does not hold the infrastructure.

That's by the freight railroads. I think you have to have some more humility to good people on the railroad, especially in Amtrak moving things forward, especially with Chuck Schumer and also with the officials on Monday guaranteeing the new tunnel being built in Manhattan to New Jersey. If Trump gets an office will not get railroaded or won't go away. We got to give credit where credit is due.

David Furst: What about those thoughts on the railroad and the funding?

Nolan Hicks: No. Actually, I think we were talking about that just before he came on the air, which is that Amtrak is an entity that gets a little bit of money every 20 years and then gets starved, and then Amtrak gets more money every 20 years and then gets starved. Building an apparatus that's capable of planning and executing large projects when that's the pattern of behavior, it becomes very hard to hold on the staff. It becomes very hard to find ways to fund the staff.

It's a legitimate point. When we were talking earlier about the New York City to Montreal line and I was talking about how Amtrak was yelling at the Canadian freight railroads to fix their tracks, it's an example of how Amtrak in many cases, not on the Northeast Corridor but in many cases, is dependent on the freight railroads for access and for some maintenance services. There's, I guess, two thrusts to this. Amtrak needs recurring funding. That's true.

Amtrak also just got a giant slug of money in this pattern that we've talked about to do a whole lot of work on the Northeast Corridor. A lot of it is going to what he referred to. It's called the Gateway Project, which is putting a new tunnel with two tracks under the Hudson River and then rehabbing the existing tunnel, basically ripping it down to the studs and then rebuilding it essentially on the two existing, what they call the North River tubes going into Penn Station, so there will be four tracks.

I don't think anyone argues with the necessity of that project. What people are focusing on, what people are raising questions about is, how is Amtrak spending the rest of that $40 billion? What is it going towards? All those projects, all of which have merit, but which projects have the most merit and which projects are the most essential? To take his congestion pricing point, so the governor backed congestion pricing until the governor didn't back congestion pricing.

After the governor decided to put it on indefinite pause, the MTA chairman, Janno Lieber, came out and said, "We have to tear apart our capital program. We have to go absolutely to the studs and figure out what is absolutely positively essential to the running of the service and everything else comes out. To that point, they came back with a number that is all the money's going to go to state of good repair work and all the fancy projects are basically put on hold.

When you look at what Amtrak is funding separate from Gateway and separate from the new tunnel through Baltimore and there's some other things in there that I think everyone agrees need to be done, but there are a lot of projects that raise questions about Amtrak's priority. Rehabbing all these stations along the Northeast is very nice, but what's the point of a nice glittering station if the wires don't work to get the trains in and out of it? It's that sort of needs test question. Has Amtrak done that sort of analysis? If so, why we've ended up in a world where there are plans to rehab all these stations, but not to fix the wiring to keep the trains running.

David Furst: I know. I have to say, there's a lot of calls coming through right now, so let's try to get one more caller in very quickly. Let's hear from Dominique. Welcome to The Brian Lehrer Show, calling from Manhattan. Hello.

Dominique: Yes, hi. Throughout my entire life, because I grew up in Princeton, New Jersey, we did alternate between taking New Jersey Transit sometimes a lot, and going by car into Manhattan. Right now, I'm trying to unload my parents' house, so I'm spending a lot of time in Princeton. Sometimes I go in by train. Sometimes I go in by car. I won't take you through a roster of the negative experiences I've had on New Jersey Transit.

I will say that my parents were from Switzerland. I'm first generation. I go back there a lot. I don't understand why the American train companies are not taking a cue from there. There is the difference in the train service there and generally in Europe is so huge that it's unbelievable. When my cousins come over here, aside from the fact that New Jersey Transit trains are filthy and in disrepair inside, not just out, they're appalled. It looks like a third-world train service.

David Furst: Well, certainly, it's a question that we hear a lot, right? Why can't it be like in Europe? The amount that you pay to travel on rail can be very different in Europe and the amount of funding that these services receive.

Nolan Hicks: It's a question that we could do a dissertation on it. I've never been to Switzerland. I hear it's gorgeous. I think every third James Bond movie has a ski scene set there. I really would love to go at some point, but this is not to say that the railroads in Europe are without problem. Trains running in and out of Paris can be delayed, not to the extent that you would think or feel of it here and the stations are in better shape. Some of that is a question of funding. Some of it is a question of operational expense.

Our railroads are far less efficient than the railroads over there because management over there and the labor unions have squared off. There have been nasty strikes that have shut down the service, but there has been a real concerted effort to dramatically shrink the headcount needed to run the railroads there in a way that there has not been here because to do that here would require politicians basically giving the transit agencies authority to go do battle with the unions.

When the unions have significant sway in primary battles or in general elections, there's a compact. It actually put Nassau County into bankruptcy in the late '90s where, basically, you get a nice contract. We get your support in the election and everyone shakes their hands. It all works until it doesn't work because so much money is being consumed by labor expense. You run out of money. There's that piece of it.

The piece of it on top of that is, well, if we're going to accept a world in which we view transit agencies as basically jobs programs that provide transit instead of transit programs that provide jobs, the way our politicians treat it is backwards from how a lot of other places treat it. You have to fund it that way. Then people don't want their taxes raised, so you end up in a world where you have a bunch of very expensive contracts that require a lot of headcount, and then politicians refusing to raise the taxes to pay for it.

Then on top of all that, you have questions about how things get built, how much it costs for us to build things, and what things are we building. Are we building things that people want because you get a really nice ribbon-cutting and you can take credit for it? You can't have a ribbon-cutting for wires. You can't have a ribbon-cutting for subway signals.

David Furst: You need them.

Nolan Hicks: You need them. You need them. To walk back a decade, there was a program. It was $1 billion. Cuomo was backing it to put USB ports in subway stations and to put nice screens in the subway stations as the entire system was falling apart. It was called the Enhanced Station Initiative. It's like, "This isn't bad, but the subway system desperately needs signals." That's $1 billion that could be going into fixing the signals. Do the trains run or do the trains not run? Then everything on top of that is icing on the cake.

David Furst: Well, there's so much more to talk about. We're going to have to leave it there for now. Nolan Hicks covers city agencies, politics, transit, contributes to New York Magazine. You can read more in his current article, Amtrak's Northeast Corridor Power Supply is Ancient and Failing. Nolan Hicks, thanks for joining us.

Nolan Hicks: Thank you so much for having me.

 

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