Service suspended between STM and GCT

Took the 10:10am Danbury thinking it was 9:54 or something like that (didnt know the new time at last minute) due to the traffic still a mess on I-95 "good service" the sign said at danbury... I also thought this was going to be fixed by the time i got down there. Got down to stamford at 11:25 just missing the 11am. The 12pm noon went by at 12:15 got to old Greenwich ok. I also got to see a big 10+ car amtrak train heading to Boston being run by 2 diesels Now I'm just trying to fugure out how to get back to Danbury tonight. Eek! Kudos to the Danbury crew keeping us informed and the one conductor/flagger stationed in Stamford usually on Danbury working today as an ambassador to help people with their travels.
I just wish train time would give me an idea what's running and when. It was disabled at Stamford at 11:45 due to it becoming extremely inaccurate but helped me before it went down trying to figure out what time I'd be in old Greenwich

This would be a good reason to acquire some more diesel locomotives and coaches, even if they are used, just to keep "in reserve".

3 Weeks? Yiiiiipe...

Hearing all of this reminds me of a story in a Trains magazine article on the NEC electrification regarding an incident in January 1979 when a (ConEd?) substation at West Farms had its roof blown off from an explosion and brought all NHL traffic to a halt. How long did it take for regular service to resume then?

The Con Ed Distrubution network in the past is old and somewhat failure prone on it's own,
even after years of "upgrades",the system still fails,due to old wires/cables/equipment in key locations.
With Cos Cob gone,the abilty to feed the overhead from Ct is gone as well.
Con-Ed is on the hook for this outage,MN is trying to find away to get power from the remains of the internal
network to work again.

It could be weeks for the grid to return to normal operating status. But that is not the same as the grid returning to full operation, period. Boston went through this not too long ago when a massive transformer explosion caused a very severe and widespread blackout in parts of the Back Bay and South End neighborhoods. Couple days in winter with the power off. Then it came back, but it was glitchy for weeks and had to be shut down several more times on scheduled outages for heavy repair to be done to the feeds. So when they say weeks, that is usually the figure quoted for when the army of Con Ed. workers are out doing heavy repairs to get the feed up to full capacity and no longer reliant on other sources. It's a warning that there probably will be overnight or well off-peak scheduled outages disrupting some train schedules while they are performing the heaviest of the repairs. It does not mean they can't band-aid the power source together quickly to get the trains running in the interim and service during peak hours back to more or less normal by next week. After all, doesn't appear any RR infrastructure was damaged by this...just the originating source under Con Ed. jurisdiction. There definitely is enough grid resiliency to work around that. Just not instantaneously enough to save today's commute.

We begin to see some components of the contingency plan take shape. CTTransit is adding extra I-Bus service tomorrow:

http://cttransit.com/uploads_docs/I-BUS ... -26-13.pdf" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

http://web.mta.info/supplemental/mnr/mn ... _info.html" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

Why are the Harrison trains bypassing Pelham and Mt Vernon East? Also, I presume that the STM-Rye trains will be MU's...?

Saw some Danbury thru trains on the board when I passed by a half hour ago, I'm assuming they're making all stops.

NH2060 wrote:Good grief they just can't get a break, can they? This is actually is turning out to possibly be an even worse situation delays/cancellations/service outage-wise than the Bridgeport derailment. At least then GCT-STM had regular service and BPT-NHV had 20 minute headways bridged by frequent bus shuttles.

lirr42 wrote:Northeast Regionals are getting fitted out with dual modes at NHV for the trip to Penn, so that service is operating with delays. Acela Express service remains suspended NHV-NYP.

On a somewhat lighter note, get your cameras out now, folks!

Bridgeport derailment was worse, yes while power was lost here this didnt send anyone to the hospital.

beanbag wrote:

NH2060 wrote:Good grief they just can't get a break, can they? This is actually is turning out to possibly be an even worse situation delays/cancellations/service outage-wise than the Bridgeport derailment. At least then GCT-STM had regular service and BPT-NHV had 20 minute headways bridged by frequent bus shuttles.

lirr42 wrote:Northeast Regionals are getting fitted out with dual modes at NHV for the trip to Penn, so that service is operating with delays. Acela Express service remains suspended NHV-NYP.

On a somewhat lighter note, get your cameras out now, folks!

Bridgeport derailment was worse, yes while power was lost here this didnt send anyone to the hospital.

Yes, no one injured but disruption could be much worse in the days ahead because so much closer to Gotham. I have to say in 20 years of riding MN this was the worst communication to the public yet. Platform annoucements were pretty much nonexistent, other than "delays." By mid-day nothing that you could plan the rest of your day, or even week by.

The other thing this demonstrates in spades is the lack of investment in new or maintaining existing infrastructure in this country. Sad.

How many substations do they have besides Mount Vernon to power the New Haven Line? Seems like you would want to have backups along the line just in case something like this happens if both feeders go out.

Westporter wrote:

beanbag wrote:

NH2060 wrote:Good grief they just can't get a break, can they? This is actually is turning out to possibly be an even worse situation delays/cancellations/service outage-wise than the Bridgeport derailment. At least then GCT-STM had regular service and BPT-NHV had 20 minute headways bridged by frequent bus shuttles.

lirr42 wrote:Northeast Regionals are getting fitted out with dual modes at NHV for the trip to Penn, so that service is operating with delays. Acela Express service remains suspended NHV-NYP.

On a somewhat lighter note, get your cameras out now, folks!

Bridgeport derailment was worse, yes while power was lost here this didnt send anyone to the hospital.

Yes, no one injured but disruption could be much worse in the days ahead because so much closer to Gotham. I have to say in 20 years of riding MN this was the worst communication to the public yet. Platform annoucements were pretty much nonexistent, other than "delays." By mid-day nothing that you could plan the rest of your day, or even week by.

The other thing this demonstrates in spades is the lack of investment in new or maintaining existing infrastructure in this country. Sad.

Well the platform announcements were probably nonexistent because as someone had said earlier there was very likely a minefield of disabled trains in the affected area, so instead of having the usual straight shot to expected platforms its very likely the trains that could indeed run were navigating around those that could not. Wont do you much good if you say a train is going to come in on X-track and then "oh no were sorry, there is a disabled Acela blocking that track. Everyone go all the way across to Y-track."

To add to your second point, this is more a reflection on MN, first the rail joint pops and now the feeder wire goes. No other commuter railroad seems to be having this many disastrous infrastructure failures in such a short time frame.

beanbag wrote:

Westporter wrote:
Yes, no one injured but disruption could be much worse in the days ahead because so much closer to Gotham. I have to say in 20 years of riding MN this was the worst communication to the public yet. Platform annoucements were pretty much nonexistent, other than "delays." By mid-day nothing that you could plan the rest of your day, or even week by.

The other thing this demonstrates in spades is the lack of investment in new or maintaining existing infrastructure in this country. Sad.

Well the platform announcements were probably nonexistent because as someone had said earlier there was very likely a minefield of disabled trains in the affected area, so instead of having the usual straight shot to expected platforms its very likely the trains that could indeed run were navigating around those that could not. Wont do you much good if you say a train is going to come in on X-track and then "oh no were sorry, there is a disabled Acela blocking that track. Everyone go all the way across to Y-track."

To add to your second point, this is more a reflection on MN, first the rail joint pops and now the feeder wire goes. No other commuter railroad seems to be having this many disastrous infrastructure failures in such a short time frame.

There was a lack of platform announcements east of Stamford too. Just "delays" posted on the board. This is the first time since that winter 2 or 3 years ago that I have been really disappointed with Metro North. Yes there were service disruptions since but they were all communicated and handled well. I won't go into my long ordeal with customer service but will say the 2nd lady whom I spoke to was very helpful and nice. On board personnel as always handled the disruption very well. I hope that Metro North is able to handle things well tomorrow.

NH2060 wrote:Good grief they just can't get a break, can they? This is actually is turning out to possibly be an even worse situation delays/cancellations/service outage-wise than the Bridgeport derailment. At least then GCT-STM had regular service and BPT-NHV had 20 minute headways bridged by frequent bus shuttles.

lirr42 wrote:Northeast Regionals are getting fitted out with dual modes at NHV for the trip to Penn, so that service is operating with delays. Acela Express service remains suspended NHV-NYP.

On a somewhat lighter note, get your cameras out now, folks!

Being able to get this on video made things much better. I only had my cell phone with me today (not an iPhone) so the quality is poor but I will be sure to bring a real camera with me tomorrow.

beanbag wrote:

NH2060 wrote:Good grief they just can't get a break, can they? This is actually is turning out to possibly be an even worse situation delays/cancellations/service outage-wise than the Bridgeport derailment. At least then GCT-STM had regular service and BPT-NHV had 20 minute headways bridged by frequent bus shuttles.

lirr42 wrote:Northeast Regionals are getting fitted out with dual modes at NHV for the trip to Penn, so that service is operating with delays. Acela Express service remains suspended NHV-NYP.

On a somewhat lighter note, get your cameras out now, folks!

Bridgeport derailment was worse, yes while power was lost here this didnt send anyone to the hospital.

Read the bolded and italicized portion. I'm strictly talking about the service disruptions, not what caused them. That's how big of a mess this is. And we all thought the disruptions caused by the derailment were bad enough. Those are looking like a piece of cake even with the bus transfers compared to this. Has nothing to do with the severity of the physical/psychological harm inflicted on passengers and crew.

beanbag wrote:To add to your second point, this is more a reflection on MN, first the rail joint pops and now the feeder wire goes. No other commuter railroad seems to be having this many disastrous infrastructure failures in such a short time frame.

Except if I'm not mistaken this was a ConEd feeder line not owned by MNR. Since the railroad buys commercial power from the utility companies (something they've done for 100% of the New Haven Line's electricity since 1986) they can't exactly be held accountable for this. It's just bad timing for MNR given what's happened previously.