U.S.

With Amtrak Link Unavailable, Travel Plans Come Apart

By ASHLEY SOUTHALL and 


People waiting to board a bus from New York to Washington on Wednesday. Amtrak service was  suspended because of the derailment in Philadelphia on Tuesday night. Andrew Burton/Getty Images 

For thousands of people on Wednesday morning, a routine commute between New York and Washington became a mad scramble for a ride after the derailment of an Amtrak train on Tuesday shut down the rail link in Philadelphia.
Airline shuttles between New York and Washington quickly overbooked. Lines at rental car companies grew by the hour, and buses were packed.
With Amtrak service through Philadelphia expected to be suspended for days, officials warned that the headaches would only worsen. Amtrak is operating on a modified schedule elsewhere in the East.
Regional bus services like Megabus and Greyhound, which owns BoltBus, added trips and either honored Amtrak tickets or allowed customers to trade them in.
“Monday through Thursday is generally slow, and today just about all the buses are sold out,” a supervisor at BestBus, Modupe Akiwumi, said. ”This is almost, though not quite, like holiday travel.”


The lines in Midtown Manhattan for Megabus trips to Philadelphia, Delaware, Baltimore and Washington stretched for blocks. Hundreds of people, many of whom said they had been scheduled to take Amtrak home or to work, were waiting.


A passenger waited in a deserted boarding area at Union Station in Washington on Wednesday. Alex Wong/Getty Images 

Across the river, New Jersey Transit suspended service between 30th Street Station in Philadelphia and Cherry Hill, N.J., but the agency said it was accepting Amtrak tickets on rail and bus lines, and on light rail from Trenton to Camden, N.J. Service on some local commuter lines was also affected because they share the rails with Amtrak.
The rail line between Washington and Boston, known as the Northeast Corridor, is the busiest in the nation. In 2014, 11.6 million passengers traveled on Amtrak along the 457-mile route, a record number and one that continues to grow.


But the infrastructure is increasingly strained, officials said, as more people turn to the tracks as an alternative to overcrowded roadways and uninviting airports. Joseph H. Boardman, the president and chief executive of Amtrak, said the situation was getting worse by the day in a report on the railroad’s performance for the 2014 fiscal year.
“As more and more people choose Amtrak for their travel needs, investments must be made in the tracks, tunnels, bridges and other infrastructure used by intercity passenger trains, particularly on the Northeast Corridor and in Chicago,” he said.

Graphic: Investigating the Philadelphia Amtrak Train Derailment 


After Tuesday night’s accident, it was clear just how quickly and deeply a disruption of service could ripple through the region.
At Pennsylvania Station in New York and Union Station in Washington, commuters found their routine trips abruptly canceled, their trusted link to meetings and conferences suddenly missing.



SLIDE SHOW|9 Photos

Amtrak Train Derails in Philadelphia

Amtrak Train Derails in Philadelphia

Jim Lo Scalzo/European Pressphoto Agency 

Many travelers were irritated that they had not been alerted to the problems earlier. Others took it as a sign that they could no longer rely on public transportation to take them to their destinations safely.
As people milled about at Union Station, one woman called out to her companion that their bus was about to leave, hurrying past Amtrak gates that seemed quieter than usual.
“People were a little upset that they weren’t making announcements, and they said when we get to Washington that they would make announcements,” said John Belanich, 52, who was traveling from Alabama to New York and was stuck in Washington. “But we got off the train and we heard nothing.”
Andrea Lynch, who was headed to Washington for work training, said her problems were unimportant compared with those of people on the derailed train. “For me, it’s not really that big a deal,” she said. “The big deal is we have a federal government that can’t, for political reasons, invest in public transportation. It’s infuriating.”
Tim Griffin, 32, who usually flies to New York from Greenville, S.C., had decided instead to take Amtrak to a funeral.
“I didn’t think it would affect us,” he said as he waited in a growing line for guidance at Union Station. “But I see that it has.”

Tatiana Schlossberg, Ben Mueller, Elizabeth Harris and John Surico contributed reporting.