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June 20 (UPI) -- Crews have restored power to Amtrak commuter lines in the New York City metro area after an outage forced the shutdown of service between Philadelphia and New Haven Connecticut, officials said late Thursday. While most lines have been restored, delays are expected to continue into the overnight hours.
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Trains in and out of New York's Penn Station were affected, Amtrak said, and officials said trains in New Jersey had also been shut down.
The power outage came not long after officials warned that a heat wave along the eastern seaboard could cause trains to slow down, and while service has been restored, there will be significant delays as Amtrak works to catch up, the company said on social media.
"High temperatures may require trains to operate at lower speeds, resulting in delays of up to 60 minutes between the hours 12 noon and 7:30 p.m. for the remainder of the week," Amtrak said in a social media post when the outage occurred.
On top of the power disruption, Amtrak was also dealing with a brush fire in Secaucus, N.J. that also slowed down the rail line's operations
The power outage closed about 150 miles of track on all, and while there is no firm number yet on the number of commuters affected, it frustrated plenty.
"I'm hot, I'm exasperated," Ilana Nathan, 29, told the New York Times. "I just want to go home." Nathan had tried various modes of transportation, including Amtrak trains that were canceled after a 90 minute wait, PATH trains, and Uber, for which she had to pay surge pricing, to get from Long Island to her home in Cherry Hill, N.J., spending 6 hours in transit, all told.
Jim Casey, 59, said a three hour wait in Penn station had derailed his plans for an evening trip to the beach and he seemed barely optimistic that he would get home any time soon Thursday night.
"Right now there's one tunnel in and one tunnel out," Casey who commutes to Manhattan from Bucks County, Pa., said. "If something goes wrong in the tunnels we're stuck."
This was the fourth reported major disruption in the last two months that caused long delays for commuters in the New York metro, and the second delay for Casey this week. A train breakdown also made him late to work Tuesday morning and a two hour delay got him home late, too.
Casey told The Times that he doubts "this problem will ever go away."
Trains that typically go direct to midtown Manhattan were diverted to Hoboken, N.J., and NJ Transit said their trains were heading from Newark to Trenton.
Gery Williams, an executive vice president of Amtrak, said the power outage was the result of "a malfunctioning circuit-breaker" in New Jersey under the Hudson River, just west of the rail line tracks.
He said that he met on Thursday with New Jersey Transit officials to determine ways to upgrade the rail infrastructure "so that our customers don't have to put up with this awful experience" again. He said there had been "too many" significant disruptions recently.
