At a summit of transit executives Wednesday, Gov. Phil Murphy refused to guarantee that New Jersey Transit riders will not go through another summer of service interruptions and cancellations.
“You can’t make a promise but you can increase your odds that you’ll have fewer challenges,” Murphy said.
And for now, it seems that interim inspections and recent repairs by Amtrak along 240 miles of track between Trenton and New York have stabilized an antiquated rail system prone to breakdowns.
“We have learned more that I think is going to allow us to approach the coming year with a higher degree of certainty that we can perform as expected,” said Amtrak CEO Steve Gardner.
Amtrak just scored $112 million in federal grants to begin critical infrastructure improvements on signals, catenary wires and bridges along the Northeast Corridor in New Jersey. But there are questions about the continuing flow of federal dollars once the Trump administration takes over in January with what’s widely regarded as a mandate to slash government spending, including in transportation.
“We have to do the environmental work and the design work. And so we think there’s certainly a strong interest — from what we can understand so far from the new administration — to make things more efficient, to get better outcomes,” Gardner said. “And we’ll be working to try and build partnerships there to get these dollars.”
The first Trump administration quashed funding for the Gateway rail tunnel project. President Joe Biden subsequently guaranteed funding for Gateway — and that is solid, Murphy said.
Murphy met last week with President-elect Donald Trump who, he said, understands infrastructure.
“That’s not to say we can sit on our hands and let the grass grow … We want to obligate those funds as fast as possible,” he said, referring to the funding for Northeast Corridor upgrades.
“It is so obviously clear that one of the reasons why getting large transformative projects completed in the U.S. is a function of people trying to manage them in an election cycle — which is not possible. They’re too big and take too long,” said Tony Coscia, of Amtrak’s board of director.
Meanwhile, separate investigations continue into how the commuter rail system could have failed so utterly this summer leaving travelers stranded, and some trains stalled for hours inside Hudson River tunnels. Commuters furious over paying higher fares for bad service complained to members of Congress — who called on both Amtrak and NJ Transit to find the cause of the failures.
“I think some people were expecting a single root cause — and we haven’t identified any proverbial smoking gun, as to what caused those series of incidents,” Kevin Corbett, president and CEO of NJ Transit, said.
