Acela 2151 Stalled in Queens

Shop deals on ebay
Advertise with us
shop deals on amazon
Amtrak Unlimited Discussion Forum

Help Support Amtrak Unlimited Discussion Forum:

This site may earn a commission from merchant affiliate links, including eBay, Amazon, and others.
Maverickstation

Maverickstation

Lead Service Attendant
Joined
Mar 2, 2017
Messages
386
Location
Boston, MA (Eastie)
Acela train 2151, which leaves Boston South Station at 5:05 am each weekday is a popular train (in normal times) for people traveling to New York for meetings, and arrives early enough to put in a day in and get back to Boston by late afternoon, early evening.

Not on Valentine's Day though.

Granted stuff happens, but why on the green earth did it take so long to get the a rescue engine to move the train.

https://www.nbcnewyork.com/news/loc...n-in-queens-for-5-hours-and-counting/3552641/
Ken
 
Last edited:
Like leaving a loaded plane on the tarmac at the edge of the airport for hours on end.

There's an Amtrak P32DM sitting in Penn Station for rescues for any of 3 railroads. Over the decades, Amtrak locos have dragged dead LIRR MU trains out of the tunnel. Until 2010, LIRR had their own Harold protect engines (a pair of SW1001's). They once shoved an NJT train all the way back to their MMC complex.

This Acela 2151 got stuck just between Harold and Hunterspoint Avenue according to asm.transitdocs that I saw. This is also a mile east of LIRR's LIC coach yard. I don't see any valid excuse why it should have taken 7 hours.
 
7 hours - How many scores of trains ran by in that time ?

This is AM rush hour in Queens at the busiest railroad junction in North America. There are plenty of LIRR, NJT, and Amtrak crews and foreman nearby, qualified on trackage to Penn Station. They could even have called for a LIRR locomotive in nearby Long Island City and dragged it to Penn Station, Woodside or Hunterpoint Avenue.

There are NO excuses.
 
I think the story (as the GPS doesn't pig accurately at the same location every time) tells the sadness of this train's breakdown.

I agree that it was inexcusable that the train was stuck right at the busiest railroad Junction in North America for that long. I would think that if they were nervous about the condition of the train and getting it through the North River tunnel they could have at least shunted the train into the LIRR's Hunterspoint Avenue Station nearby using a diesel locomotive from the yard (it has high level platforms) for an evacuation and then let anyone who's last stop was in New York City transfer to the subway and arrange alternate transportation for through passengers to Penn Station to continue on other trains.
 
Shove it back to Woodside where passengers could have been placed on the next LIRR train from Jamaica or Port Washington to Penn Station within a few minutes, then haul their supertrain equipment into Sunnyside. If to the Port Washington branch, LIRR could easily single thread around it with a crossover just east of the station.

But it seems Amtrak is content to treat even cherished Acela passsengers as miserably as they would passengers in Lynchburg or anywhere in flyover county and now have another trainload of never agains, who have deep pockets to afford more expensive options. See if Schumer demands investigations like the two Virginia senators. I bet not.
 
Last edited:
I don't understand how a train loaded with passengers sits for that long in that location. It's right near Sunnyside, there isn't a single yard motor available to shove the thing into NYP?

I feel like this isn't the first time a train has broken down in Queens and sat for hours though.
 
Danib62 said:
I don't understand how a train loaded with passengers sits for that long in that location. It's right near Sunnyside, there isn't a single yard motor available to shove the thing into NYP?
Click to expand...
And all the while it was blocking a track in what is generally considered to be a major bottleneck area. Perhaps it is time for Senator Schumer to call for an investigation and a report on what series of breakdowns happened other than the train itself and why it took seven hours, in the spirit of the investigation of the recent Virginia fiasco.
 
Last edited:
These situations are SOOO annoying for the crews stuck on the trains, because they can never get ACCURATE info regarding rescue times or plans. The crews were undoubtedly told it will be 60-90 minutes.... then another hour, then not sure how much longer, etc.

It is very hard to keep passengers satisfied when even the operating crew can't get accurate time frames for response times. I went thru this probably 100 times over my career.
 
So many fiascos (fiasci?) bodes of management asleep at the switch. (Pun intended) Time for some changes? I wonder what the personal and economic consequences were for those pax who missed important meetings.
 
Holy cannoli that must have been awful for the passengers AND train crew. Ugh. I don't know enough to understand how "rescue" locos work but it sounds like I'd agree with @Amtrak25 ... no excuse for that length of failure.
 
Knowing Amtrak and Acelas my guess is that the Acela locked up its brakes and the Sunnyside unit of the famous maintenance laptop required to reboot the thing was AWOL, so a maintenance laptop had to be brought in from Boston or Washington. Maybe the first one did not work so a second one had to be brought in from somewhere else, and so on. Just speculation. But there was one time when I spent several hours sitting in a locked up Acela while they frantically tried to find and get one of those blessed laptops to the train. As for why they cannot equip each train with one and train the Engineer to operate it in a restricted mode, I would never know.
 
Last edited:
Can't they override and manually release the brakes and haul it away ? Locomotives have dragged dead LIRR trains (their MU's are not compatible with any locomotive) out of the tunnel. But they have to go just 10MPH.
 
Last edited:
Amtrak25 said:
Can't they override and manually relase the brakes and haul it away ? Locomotives have dragged dead LIRR trains (their MU's are not compatible with any locomotive) out of the tunnel. But they have to go just 10MPH.
Click to expand...
I am not sure if it is brakes or what. But there is a well known failure mode that requires the blessed laptop to release the train to a state where it can me moved. I don't know anything beyond that.
 
Last edited:
jis said:
Knowing Amtrak and Acelas my guess is that the Acela locked up its brakes and the the Sunnyside unit of the famous maintenance laptop required to reboot the thing was AWOL, so a maintenance laptop had to be brought in from Boston or Washington. Maybe the first one did not work so a second one had to be brought in from somewhere else, and so on. Just speculation. But there was one time when I spent several hours sitting in a locked up Acela while they frantically tried to find and get one of those blessed laptops to the train. As for why they cannot equip each train with one and train the Engineer to operate it in a restricted mode, I would never know.
Click to expand...
But but but, that would cost $3-400 for each of the 20 or so Acela trainsets from thee precious Amtrak maintenance budget. Oh Noes!
 
Unpopular opinion: consider awaiting facts before throwing stones.

While I don't have experience with these particular laptops, I do have experience with fancy test laptops and it isn't as easy as going and buying a laptop, it's the millions of dollars (if the OEM is even willing to give you a price) on the license to operate their fancy software on said laptop.
 
Ryan said:
Unpopular opinion: consider awaiting facts before throwing stones.

While I don't have experience with these particular laptops, I do have experience with fancy test laptops and it isn't as easy as going and buying a laptop, it's the millions of dollars (if the OEM is even willing to give you a price) on the license to operate their fancy software on said laptop.
Click to expand...
I agree with you. It is unlikely that there is a work around for the original poor system design and integration.

I have heard whispers that this is one of the many reasons that Amtrak wants to get rid of this equipment as soon as it can.
 
Here’s a solution:

Stop all train traffic along that stretch of track for 15 minutes.

Let the passengers walk off the train.

Let them board the next LIRR train that goes by, on the way to NYP.

I was on a train on the NEC about 20 years ago. It broke down. We got off the train and walked along the tracks and were picked up. It was an easy solution.
 
The most this should take if everything goes wrong is 2 to 3 hours in my opinion. And most of the time a completely disabled train situation should be resolved in 1 to 2 hours at most. Although unless you actually have first hand knowledge it is also hard to speculate on exactly what should have happened or where things went wrong. There could have been more than one possible solution. Probably a multitude of factors but in the end there does seem to be something in the corporate culture coming from the top mgmt of Amtrak increasingly the last few years of it being ok to cancel trains for weather for example or to have consistent mechanical breakdowns across the whole system without any managers being held accountable in a real sense. I don't know why this is and I think it is a separate issue that just financial reasons. Maybe more a management culture that is prioritizing other issues at the expense of being focused on actual train performance
 

Latest posts

Back
Top