Amid ongoing service concerns, NJ Transit officials joined New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy and Amtrak officials to highlight progress on a joint inspection, maintenance, and improvement program for the Northeast Corridor and NJ Transit’s trains.
Today’s meeting follows a June 27 meeting to determine a joint action plan to address several major service disruptions throughout the summer.
After issuing a report in August that included details of joint efforts and progress to date, Amtrak and NJ Transit released a new progress report today. In it, they discussed the recently awarded grants for nearly $300 million in federal funding to modernize critical rail infrastructure in New Jersey.
Over the course of the past five months, Amtrak and NJ Transit made the following improvements executing on their joint plan:
- Amtrak performed 240 Track Miles of catenary system inspection on the Northeast Corridor between Trenton and New York City and renewed approximately 2,000 hardware components within the area
- Amtrak conducted helicopter inspections of the entire Northeast Corridor overhead catenary system between Trenton and the North River Tunnel, right outside New York Penn Station and made 839 hardware replacements from the defects identified from the more than 2,000 catenary structures captured from the photographs taken during the inspections
- Amtrak performed photo inspections via special hi-rail vehicle of tunnels and tracks within New York Penn Station
- Amtrak identified and remediated electric traction components and replaced overhead wire to ensure reliability
- NJ Transit and Amtrak increased equipment inspections and used high-definition video on top of locomotives to document the interaction of NJ Transit equipment with Amtrak wires
- NJ Transit also completed visual and hands-on inspections of approximately 82 route-miles of overhead catenary system on its territory
