Amtrak Passengers Face Record Delays From Extreme Weather

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By Minho Kim, The New York Times. 

Excerpt: On June 20, after millions of Americans had suffered through a sweltering heat wave for three days, Amtrak sent an ominous warning over social media: Trains connecting the largest cities in Northeast could face up to an hour of delay from high temperatures. Later that afternoon, after the temperature peaked at 96 degrees in Newark, Amtrak lost electricity near the New Jersey side of the Hudson River tunnels. The power failure soon shuttered a 150-mile stretch of the busiest rail corridor in the United States for more than three hours. ...Extreme weather events bogged down Amtrak trains for more than 4,010 hours in the 2023 fiscal year, which began in October 2022 and ended in September 2023, according to a Times analysis of more than 313,000 individual train delay data dating to September 2003. ...The biggest contributor has been intensifying heat waves. ...Railways made from steel are prone to deformities when exposed to direct sunlight during heat waves. The changes, known as sun kinks, occur when the steel overheats and buckles, creating wobbly and dangerous curves that require railroads to drastically reduce the speed of their trains to avoid derailments.... 

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