(Bloomberg) -- One passenger suffered repeated panic attacks. Others held hands to try to comfort each other. Firefighters attended to at least two people with medical issues. Business workers shed layer after layer of clothes, drenched in sweat.
They were all in an NJ Transit train that stayed unmoving, underground, with no air conditioning for three hours on Wednesday evening.
All the while, passengers say they were given almost no information from the crew about what was going on. They were told, though, that anyone who tried to leave the train should expect to be electrocuted or arrested. An hour and half into their ordeal, the lights went out, plunging them into darkness.
The incident caps a disastrous summer for NJ Transit, which along with Amtrak has been struggling to simply keep trains moving in and out of New York City. The result has been a textbook example of a public transit doom spiral in action, in which falling ridership and ticket sales result in worse service. That risks scaring riders away and cutting further into revenue, making it all the more difficult to get workers back into Manhattan offices.
In the latest calamity, NJ Transit train 3879 from Penn Station to Trenton lost power just minutes after leaving the station at about 7 p.m., while in a tunnel under the Hudson River. It was almost 90F (32C) outside at the time, and the air conditioning instantly shut off. Passengers said most people maintained calm for about the first hour, used to extended delays.
But a little after 8:30 p.m., the backup lights shut off. Passengers turned on their phones to provide some semblance of light, but conditions, and passengers’ moods, quickly deteriorated.
Ebonique Edwards, a 35-year-old head of talent attraction at Colgate-Palmolive on her way to Rahway, New Jersey, said a man dressed in business clothes next her stripped down to his sweat-drenched undershirt.
“At first it was like, ‘Ugh, again? NJ Transit, every week!’” Edwards said. “Then it became frustration, cursing, people getting angry.”
The experience was made worse by a lack of information from the train crew, whose occasional announcements were mostly limited to assuring passengers they’d be moving “shortly.” Only Verizon customers had signals for their mobile phones, and many of them offered their use to other passengers who needed to call home.
A spokesman for NJ Transit said the incident was initially caused by an Amtrak power disruption that affected multiple tracks. While power was restored to the tracks a half hour later, the train remained without power, he said. NJ Transit eventually ordered a “rescue tow” from a diesel-powered Amtrak train.
Amtrak says the initial power failure was due to a tripped electrical power circuit, the cause of which is is still unknown. The company has found no evidence so far that the overhead wires, known as catenary lines, caused the circuit trip.
At some point, smoke flooded the cars where passengers were stranded after they opened windows in search of cooler air. That resulted in calls to firefighters.
Finally, at about 10 p.m., the train started moving again and was pulled back into Penn Station. A spokesman conceded that the dire warnings to passengers about leaving the train wasn’t “how it should have been communicated to customers,” but said “it was determined that the safest spot for customers was to remain on the train.”
Edwards said that once back at Penn Station she switched to another train and continued her journey home, but it appeared as if many other passengers called taxis or decided to stay in the city overnight.
The incident is being investigated by NJ Transit and Amtrak, the NJ Transit spokesman said. The company operates almost 700 trains a day, and its on-time performance in June was 92.3% when excluding Amtrak-related issues, he said.
Mass transit delays are a well-documented roadblock to efforts to get workers to return to the office in the aftermath of the Covid-19 pandemic. NJ Transit recently raised fares 15% to try to plug a $107 million budget deficit. Rail ridership remains about 70% of pre-pandemic levels while bus ridership has mostly recovered and in same cases exceed pre-pandemic ridership.
Edwards said while she normally would be required to go into the office Tuesday through Thursday, she was able to beg off yesterday, citing the trauma of her commute home.
She dreads the idea of getting back on NJ Transit next week.
(Updates to include statement from Amtrak in 11th paragraph.)
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