On June 20, after millions of Americans suffered through a sweltering heat wave for three days, Amtrak sent an ominous warning on social media: Trains connecting major cities in the Northeast could face up to an hour of delays due to high temperatures.
Later that afternoon, after temperatures reached 95 degrees Fahrenheit in Newark, Amtrak experienced a power outage near the New Jersey side of the Hudson River Tunnels. The outage quickly paralyzed a 150-mile stretch of the busiest rail corridor in the United States for more than three hours. The impact lasted into the next day, when trains continued to run with hours of residual delays.
As the planet warms rapidly, train delays and breakdowns are becoming more common as America’s aging rail infrastructure struggles to remain functional during prolonged extreme weather events that were not typical when the system was built.
A New York Times analysis of Amtrak data found that passengers on the rail service have faced record delays in recent years due to adverse weather conditions such as heat waves, storms, floods, high winds, low temperatures, tornadoes, lightning and wildfires.
Extreme weather events shut down Amtrak trains for more than 4,010 hours in fiscal year 2023, which began in October 2022 and ended in September 2023, according to a Times analysis of more than 313,000 individual train delay records dating back to September 2003. That was the highest number of weather-related delays in at least 20 years.
The biggest factor was intensifying heat waves. About 30% of late-arriving trains in fiscal 2023 were delayed due to heat, accounting for nearly 1,200 hours of overall delays. Heat delays more than doubled from fiscal 2018, when Amtrak passengers spent an additional 530 hours on trains after high temperatures slowed rail traffic.
Steel railroad tracks are prone to warping when exposed to direct sunlight during heat waves. These changes, called “solar bends,” occur when the steel overheats and buckles, creating wobbly and dangerous curves that force railroads to drastically reduce train speeds to avoid derailments.
“When the train is moving, you get sunburned, you’re dead,” said Louis S. Thompson, a former Federal Railroad Administration director who led efforts to overhaul Amtrak service in the Northeast. “The train is going to derail.”
Amtrak said the heat wave did not directly cause the June power outage, but many rail experts said the blazing sun on dangerously hot afternoons made unexpected outages more likely.
“Rail infrastructure is collapsing in the heat,” said Jim Mathews, president and CEO of the Rail Passengers Association, an advocacy group that advocates for improved reliability and expansion of passenger rail service in the United States.
Amtrak spokeswoman Olivia Irvin said in a statement that “heat waves could create additional stress on electrical systems and related infrastructure in general,” but that none of the “recent NEC delays were due to heat,” referring to the Northeast Corridor rail line.
She acknowledged, however, that global warming was creating challenges for the system.
“Amtrak is beginning to see that weather is impacting on-time performance and is taking action,” Irvin said in a statement. In 2022, Amtrak conducted a comprehensive climate risk assessment of its infrastructure in the Northeast as part of an effort to improve its response to severe weather, she said.
The extreme weather slowing Amtrak trains in the Northeast is also affecting the region’s heavily used commuter rail systems, such as New Jersey Transit, SEPTA in Pennsylvania and MARC in Maryland, all of which share Amtrak-owned tracks.
Without major investments in the centuries-old rail system, delays will only increase in the years to come, Thompson said.
“The B&P tunnel through Baltimore is a disaster waiting to happen, especially when there’s heavy rain and high temperatures,” he said. Amtrak has vulnerabilities “that climate change is already attacking,” he added, such as the Hudson River tunnels that flooded in 2012 when Hurricane Sandy shut down rail traffic for days and led to months of service outages while repairs were carried out.
Scientists say climate change is making storms more severe as ocean temperatures rise, providing more energy and moisture that fuel stronger winds and torrential rains.
Amtrak, a federally owned passenger rail company, is building new tunnels in Baltimore and under the Hudson River to replace century-old structures. But neither is expected to be completed for another decade.
Unusually high temperatures are responsible for an even larger share of weather-related delays along the Northeast Corridor, which connects Boston, New York and Washington. About 2,200 trains carry more than 750,000 passengers each day on the route, the busiest in the United States.
Last year, heat accounted for nearly 60% of weather-related delays, adding more than 230 hours of travel time to Amtrak trains in the Northeast. Heat-related delay hours in the region have steadily increased since fiscal 2018, when high temperatures slowed trains by 83 hours.
“You could get away with it back in the day when you had four or five really hot days in the summer,” Mr Mathews said. “But now you have so many hot days.”
The Times’ analysis of heat delays may be an underestimate, Mr. Mathews said, because mechanical failures on a hot afternoon are sometimes recorded as a technical problem rather than a weather-related delay.
Other extreme weather events that previously affected trains only a few times a year have also begun to increase. High tides, tornadoes, lightning and wildfires have each delayed trains up to 10 times more than in previous years, resulting in more than 200 hours of cumulative delays in fiscal year 2023.
That includes days like July 6, when a heat advisory was in effect across the Northeast. Lightning struck Amtrak’s power grid, causing cancellations and delays between New York City and New Haven, Conn., for hours. Climatologists say warm temperatures are making lightning strikes more common.
The delay records analyzed by the Times contain notes from Amtrak conductors that provide a detailed account of how extreme weather hampers train operations. One memo from August 2023 cites a heat order that prevented trains from traveling faster than 25 miles per hour, causing a 2.5-hour delay between Tuscaloosa, Alabama, and Meridian, Mississippi.
Amtrak does not own tracks outside the Northeast and small areas of the Midwest, and the freight railroads that host Amtrak often impose strict speed restrictions during heat waves that affect passenger trains.
In the Northeast, when steel tracks reach 52 °C (128 °F), Amtrak limits train speeds to 160 km/h (100 mph). When tracks reach 62 °C (135 °F), train speeds are limited to 130 km/h (80 mph), about half the maximum speed of Acela express trains. These restrictions are often imposed when ambient temperatures reach 35 °C (95 °F) or higher.
“These general acceleration orders can come with huge costs because of delays,” said Jacob Helman, a senior data consultant at Resilient Analytics, a research group that builds models to predict the future effects of climate change on various infrastructure.
According to a study co-authored by Helman, train delays due to heat waves will cost at least $103 billion by 2100, as more passengers and goods are stranded each year. Nationwide, railroads carry about 40 percent of long-distance freight that requires traveling hundreds of miles, the largest share of any mode of transportation.
“Heat waves can affect entire regions, with enormous consequences,” Helman said.
Tracks aren’t the only rail infrastructure threatened by frequent heat waves. Amtrak’s overhead power lines use technology dating back to the 1930s. They sag in the intense summer heat, interrupting the electrical transmission between pantographs and train wires.
Amtrak’s 2022 Northeast Vulnerability Assessment identified the entire line from southern New York to Washington as highly vulnerable to overhead power line malfunctions during heat waves. The study called New York a “notable vulnerability hotspot” for a confluence of rail operations issues caused by heat and heavy rain, including flooding, sun bending, equipment malfunctions and power outages.
Technical solutions exist, says Allan Zarembski, a professor of railroad engineering at the University of Delaware. Steel rails can be adapted to higher temperatures by exposing them to heat before installation, a process that allows the steel to withstand more thermal stress.
“We have rail lines that go through the Mojave Desert and Death Valley,” Zarembski said. “It’s not that the railroads ‘don’t know how to handle this problem.'”
What’s missing is the political will to fund infrastructure improvements that are critical in the era of climate change, not the right technology, Mathews said. Last week, House Republicans introduced an appropriations bill that would cut rail funding by more than $300 million. Last year, Republicans tried to cut Amtrak funding by 64 percent and cut money for the Northeast Corridor by 92 percent.
Amtrak is already struggling to secure enough funding to renovate its aging rail network. Modernizing the Northeast Corridor, for example, costs $117 billion, mostly to repair tracks and increase capacity. The bipartisan infrastructure bill passed by Congress in 2021 earmarks $30 billion for the Northeast Corridor, which needs new trains, bridges, tunnels, tracks and electrical systems. Amtrak can seek additional funding by applying for federal grants, which could provide a few billion dollars for projects in the Northeast.
Rail funding from the infrastructure law expires after fiscal year 2026.
“Amtrak’s fundamental dilemma is that Congress wants them to do big things, but they only want to fund small things,” Thompson said. “They’ve always been a day late and a dollar short.”