Why Amtrak’s Equipment Keeps Breaking Down: Some of It Is 100 Years Old

It was just before rush hour on a Thursday afternoon, and all of the trains between Philadelphia and New Haven, Conn., were at a standstill. But the alert Amtrak sent out did little to calm seething commuters: All it said was that service was suspended because of an “overhead power outage.”

What it did not mention was that a giant circuit breaker — a critical piece of Amtrak’s system for powering trains along the nation’s busiest stretch of passenger railroad tracks — had blown up a few miles from Midtown Manhattan, causing catastrophic damage to an electrical substation and wreaking havoc up and down the Northeast Corridor.

The heat from the explosion seared the paint off the side of the circuit breaker’s metal housing. It melted pins holding insulators on top of it, an Amtrak official said, and severed a critical ground wire. Those breaks sent the high-voltage electric current running haywire, electrifying the whole of the substation’s steel structure. The current then shot through cables back to a control room housed in a ramshackle trailer that, fortunately, was unoccupied.

The disruption on June 20 was just one in a series of delays this summer that exasperated commuters. But more than any of the other failures, the explosion that day showed that much of Amtrak’s vulnerabilities along the Northeast Corridor can be traced back to the system’s astonishing age and long-outdated technology.

Long stretches of that system are unchanged from when the defunct Pennsylvania Railroad first electrified it a century ago, The New York Times has found. And any wholesale modernization effort would come at tremendous cost and take more than a decade.

“It’s staggering, it’s just staggering that we’re still having antique technology controlling our rails,” said John Goglia, a former member of the National Transportation Safety Board whose duties included overseeing railroad investigations from 1995 to 2004. “That’s last century’s technology.”