By Justin Fox
Every time I pass by the new railroad bridge rising 50 feet above the Hackensack River in the New Jersey Meadowlands, which is visible from both turnpike and train, I say a word of thanks to Amtrak superfan Joe Biden. And then I wish that the politicians who cut ribbons at bridges and tunnel entrances, as well as people like me who ooh and aah at big construction projects, could get just as excited about new catenaries.
It’s asking a lot, I concede, not least because most people wouldn’t know a catenary — the overhead wires that supply electricity to trains — if it fell on their head. Which it just might.
The Portal North Bridge that I’ve been watching — a joint project of Amtrak and New Jersey Transit that is already more than half done, with construction so far on time and on budget — will replace a balky 110-year-old swing span that has been a frequent source of delays. Along with two new tunnels under Baltimore (replacing a 151-year-old original) on which construction started last year, and two more under the Hudson River between New Jersey and New York (supplementing a pair constructed from 1904 to 1908) that secured their final $6.9 billion batch of federal funding earlier this month, it’s a landmark in Amtrak’s efforts to unstop the bottlenecks that slow train travel along the country’s busiest passenger rail corridor.
But over the past two months, train traffic has nonetheless been repeatedly halted — mainly because of problems with the catenary and other elements of the archaic electrical system that powers trains between New York and Washington. This system is not quite as old as the bridges and tunnels now being replaced, but is pretty ancient in electrical terms, having been “constructed by the Pennsylvania Railroad between 1915 and 1938,” according to Wikipedia, “before the North American power transmission grid was fully established.” That’s why it runs on a 25 Megahertz frequency rather than the 60 Mhz now standard in US power transmission and also used along the tracks between New York and Boston (where the electrical system was upgraded in the 1990s and 2000s).
Another archaic thing about the system, transit journalist Nolan Hicks points out, is that most of the overhead wires “just hang” there, rather than being held in constant tension, as they are in high-speed rail systems around the world (as well as between New York and Boston). A new report on the Northeast Corridor’s electrical problems from the Effective Transit Alliance illustrates the difference with helpful diagrams and describes how the wires in a variable-tension catenary sag in the heat — a major cause, as my Bloomberg Opinion colleague Mark Gongloff has noted, of recent outages.
But even when it’s not hot out, trains simply can’t go as fast. Report co-author Alon Levy, a fellow at New York University’s Marron Institute of Urban Management, estimates that the lack of constant-tensioned wires adds 10 to 11 minutes to the travel time between New York and Washington.
The catenary also hasn’t been well maintained, with Amtrak itself admitting that zero percent of the mainline wiring between Washington and New York is in a state of good repair. The railroad described its own electric traction maintenance strategy as “largely reactive” and that a “run-to-fail approach is generally used.” Lately, there’s been a lot of failing.
The juxtaposition is striking: Even as Amtrak is finally making progress unstopping its Northeast Corridor tunnel and bridge bottlenecks, the electrical system is falling apart. This probably has something to do with politicians’ preference for big, tangible projects over largely invisible ones. “In New Jersey, nobody is getting elected because they promise to dedicate federal funds towards fixing Amtrak’s catenary wires,” emailed Philip Mark Plotch, principal researcher at the Eno Center for Transportation, a Washington think tank, and author of histories of New York’s Second Avenue subway and the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey.
The Federal Railroad Administration’s full rundown of the $16.4 billion in funding that “Amtrak Joe” Biden has secured for Northeast Corridor infrastructure improvements mentions only a few electrical system fixes on bridges and in tunnels. The Connect NEC 2037 Plan issued late last year by the federal/state Northeast Corridor Commission does envision replacing the catenary between Washington and New York, but not until 2037, and not with a constant-tension system.
Amtrak was created by Congress in 1970 to take over the intercity passenger operations of the country’s then-struggling private railroads, with the idea that it would run the trains while the railroad companies continued to own and manage the tracks. That’s how things have worked in most of the country, with less-than-impressive results for passenger service. But in 1976, after the bankruptcy of the Penn Central Transportation Co. — a short-lived amalgam of the Pennsylvania, New York Central and New York, New Haven and Hartford railroads — Amtrak inherited most of the 457-mile Northeast Corridor mainline between Boston and Washington. Its control of all that track has enabled it to run a high-frequency, relatively high-speed train service that turns an operating profit, with ridership that is on trend to exceed its pre-pandemic peak.
But ownership of the tracks also means Amtrak is on the hook for maintenance and capital investments that were already being deferred long before it took over in 1976, and can be a hard sell with members of Congress from other parts of country. Beyond that, I think it’s fair to say that Amtrak hasn’t always been the best-managed of organizations — plus its relationship with New Jersey Transit, which uses its tracks, has been so full of mutual recriminations lately that Plotch likened the two to a couple in the midst of a long and bitter divorce. The two transit agencies did pledge late last month to undertake a “holistic effort” to maintain and improve the electrical system and the NJ Transit equipment that connects to it. Now all they need is for the public and politicians to get excited about catenary improvements.
This article originally appeared on Bloomberg
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