The fire that disrupted train service at Penn Station for two days last week was caused by a piece of equipment that fell off one of Amtrak’s brand-new trains, an executive for the national railroad confirmed in an interview.
Amtrak executive vice president of capital delivery Laura Mason said a metal “skirt board” on the side of one of its NextGen Acela train cars hit an electric third rail, sparking the blaze. FDNY officials said they responded to the fire about 11:30 a.m. last Thursday.
Mason said the incident happened in a particularly sensitive location: Amtrak’s busy “C interlocking,” which directs trains between Penn Station and two of Amtrak’s East River tunnels. The interlocking is a key section of tracks used by Long Island Rail Road and some NJ Transit trains.
An Amtrak NextGen Acela train sits on the tracks.
“It's like having an accident at the intersection. You end up blocking both streets while you try and clear that incident,” Mason said. “We are grateful we had no injuries. We protected life and safety, and that is the most important thing.”
Mason said the railroad needed to turn off the power in the “entire vicinity so that the fire department could respond.”
Hundreds of LIRR trains were canceled, and NJ Transit Midtown Direct service was knocked out through Friday. Crews restored the tunnels on Saturday, the same day the LIRR was shut down anyway due to a strike.
The fiasco is the latest chapter in a long-simmering feud between Amtrak and the MTA, which runs the LIRR. The MTA has, in recent months, refused to allow Amtrak to test the new NextGen Acela trains on tracks owned by Metro-North because they damaged the MTA’s overhead power cables, according to a lawsuit filed by Amtrak last month.
Mason said the panel that fell off and caused the fire was unrelated to the one that damaged the overhead wires.
“They have some teething challenges,” she said of the new trains, which debuted last year.
The cause of the fire was first reported by the New York Daily News.
Service disruptions were further exacerbated by Amtrak’s ongoing repair of two of its East River tunnels that were damaged in 2012 by Hurricane Sandy. Amtrak has closed one of the damaged tubes around the clock since last year for a major reconstruction project. The work is set to be finished this summer, and the railroad aims to fully close another tube for similar work later this year.
The work has left Amtrak, LIRR and NJ Transit with only three tunnels between Penn Station and Queens. When last week’s fire knocked out two of them, all three railroads had to share one tube.
LIRR President Rob Free and MTA Chair Janno Lieber last year called for Amtrak to instead pursue a scaled-back repair of the tubes that would only require work on nights and weekends.
It’s a similar strategy implemented by Lieber in 2019 to avoid a full shutdown of the L train’s East River tunnel, which was also damaged by flooding from Hurricane Sandy. Free on Friday pointed out to reporters that he “warned” Amtrak officials that a 24/7 tunnel closure could lead to a commuting nightmare.
Mason pushed back on Lieber’s assessment and likened his L train repairs to more of a patch job compared to the ones Amtrak is conducting in its own tunnels.
“These are apples and oranges and very different projects,” Mason said. “I think that was well played for Janno to do that solution for the Canarsie line [L train tunnel], and they found a way to renew just 25% of the bench wall to get a 40-year estimated life. We're doing 100% renewal because we needed a 100-year life extension.”
During a news conference on Wednesday, Lieber continued to question Amtrak’s construction strategy.
He said he thought “that Amtrak was going to do an independent evaluation of whether they had to do a 24/7 shutdown, or whether it would be accomplishable with a night and weekend approach like the one we used on the L train. I don’t know that that’s happened.”
Mason accused Lieber of ignoring the structural needs in the tunnels that Amtrak shares with the MTA.
“Just because it makes a great political sound bite does not make it a good engineering solution,” she said.
