Serious service disruptions may face rail commuters to New York in 2015

Four rail tunnels connecting New York to New Jersey will be taken out of service in a phased process for repairs, due to damage caused by saltwater from Hurricane Sandy, Amtrak said in a press release last month. At least four of the them may have to be taken out of service for a year because of weakened concrete and corroding cast iron and steel.

Weekend crews have been working on the tunnels since the storm in October 2012, but Amtrak engineers discovered the damage was worse than previously thought.

About 400,000 passengers who normally ride trains through the tunnels to work each weekday will now have to find a different transportation medium.

The lost capacity resulting from the two Hudson River and two East River tunnels being taken out of service could result in delays not only to New York commuters but also throughout the entire New Jersey Transit system and Amtrak’s East Coast operations, as delays on one part of the route reduce the number and timeliness of trains available throughout the entire system. Long Island Rail Road also uses these tunnels.

One of the tunnels under the East River is expected to close as early as late 2015, according to The New York Times.

Amtrak, which owns the tunnels, does not have a timetable for performing the repairs but is linking the repairs to the completion of the Gateway tunnel. The Gateway Program, proposed in 2011, has not yet been fully funded.

“The rehabilitation work for both damaged tubes of the Hudson River tunnel cannotreasonably begin until after the new Gateway Tunnel is built and operating,” Amtrak said in the statement. “This will allow rail traffic to shift to the new tunnel and avoid major service impacts.”

However, Amtrak noted in a press release that the Gateway tunnel project was contingent on political support.

“The Northeast region needs to make the Gateway Program a priority, and we must get about the business of moving it forward as fast as we can,” the press release says.

New Jersey Transit is still assessing what it needs to do to respond to the situation on its end in conjunction with Amtrak and LIRR, New Jersey Transit spokesman William Smith told The Daily Princetonian, adding that it would be premature to speculate what the results of its assessment will be.

Dana Rubinstein of the media outlet Capital New York said Amtrak’s attitude toward the repairs may be overly optimistic.

“It plans to do remedial work on the tunnel during the few hours it can get in there, with the hopes that Gateway will be complete before the tunnel's innards crumble. Should everything go according to Amtrak’s ideal plans, Gateway would be complete some time in the middle of the next decade,” Rubinstein wrote. “But Amtrak’s CEO has also said that the tunnels have fewer than 20 years left in them. The railroad declines to be more precise, probably because it's impossible to say.”

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The tunnels are over 100 years old.

Another article by Rubenstein says the consensus among officials is that Gateway may be 25 years off.

Amtrak’s tunnels in the Hudson and East Rivers were already nearing capacity in 2009 and comprised the most serious bottleneck in Amtrak’s Northeast Corridor line, which connects Boston to Washington, D.C., Rubinstein said, adding that New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie’s cancellation of the Access to the Region’s Core construction project exacerbated the seriousness of the damage from Hurricane Sandy.

Christie, also an ex officio trustee of the University, directed the Port Authority of New York & New Jersey in 2011 to divert $1.8 billion in funds earmarked for Access to the Region’s Core to highway projects in New Jersey only. The Securities and Exchanges Commission was investigating the Christie administration this summer due to allegations of misrepresented bonds relating to the switch, but it could not be reached for comment as to the current status of the investigation.

Access to the Region’s Core was a commuter rail project to increase passenger service capacity on New Jersey Transit between Secaucus Junction and Manhattan.

A spokesman for Christie did not respond to a request for comment. However, Christie commented publicly on the matter in October, saying, “I’m simply not going to allow real estate values in New York to be increased without New York taxpayers picking up some of that tab.”

Kristin Appelget, University director of community and regional affairs, told the ‘Prince’ it would be premature for the University to comment on the rail link situation, as there are no firm upgrade plans in place, adding there have been a number of similar proposals over the years.

Jameson Doig GS ’61, professor emeritus of politics and public affairs and currently a visiting professor of government at Dartmouth, said the strain imposed by the ARC cancellation was predictable even before Hurricane Sandy in light of an increasing number of passengers using the rail system. Doig added that the political repercussions might be slight for Christie if he ran for president in 2016, but if he ran in New Jersey for a position other than governor, an able opponent could link him to delays in trans-Hudson rail crossing.

Alain Kornhauser GS ’71, professor of operations research and financial engineering, said that automated collision avoidance could be put into all the buses.

“That would increase the capacity of the exclusive bus lane by 50 percent, and it could handle most of the displaced volume,” Kornhauser said.

He noted these changes could not be implemented quickly, but added that the ARC project would not necessarily have been built quickly either.

This solution is cheaper than building a tunnel, he added. He added that expanding the ferry service to a very significant extent between Jersey City and New York is also an option.

“I can’t believe they’re about to close … the rail tunnels to New York, because that would be an enormous disruption,” Kornhauser said. “If the question is, ‘Are the rail tunnels between New Jersey and New York really important to New Jersey?’ It is very important … They’ll go in and patch those things and make sure they remain operative because they carry way too many people way too efficiently to lose them.”

Saunghee Ko ’17, who is from New York, said she travels there three to five times a semester to visit family and friends and see productions, in addition to going home for breaks. She said the potential repairs are an annoyance but added that she wasn’t yet concerned about them.

“I would probably be more concerned if it were happening right now,” Ko said.

An Associated Press article published on Wednesday noted that service has already been reduced from 24 trains per hour to six on weekends even in the absence of more extensive repairs.

Contributor Aana Bansal contributed reporting.