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New Jersey Transit commuters comment on delays and cancellations, Amtrak asks for patience

NEW JERSEY (WABC) — With the holiday season now in full swing, concerns continue to linger among New Jersey Transit customers this week.

For weeks, passengers have been faced with seemingly endless delays and cancellations, and as the decades-old rail infrastructure continues to age, the problem is only likely to get worse.

“If you’re in this city and something like this happens, you’re stuck!” said one commuter.

Trouble ahead. Trouble behind us.

“I commute twice a week and it’s a nightmare,” said another commuter.

“They make you come here and wait for hours, and then they say, 'Yeah, we don't have any trains right now,'” said Brendan McDonagh, an NJ Transit commuter.

New Jersey Transit commuters are pessimistic, and with good reason. They're crammed into a railroad that appears to be falling apart.

“Sometimes I'm scared to go to work and I don't know what's going to happen. There are days when I walk into Penn Station and I think, 'Oh no, here we go again!' It's just awful. The service is terrible and this has been the worst year,” said Victor Velez, an NJ Transit commuter.

A third of the trains are around 40 years old and break down twice as often as they did ten years ago.

You cross the Hackensack River on a hundred-year-old portal bridge and descend into a hundred-year-old tunnel under the Hudson River, whose overhead wires date back to the time of the Roosevelt administration.

“The recent performance has been unacceptable across the board,” said New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy.

Governor Murphy summoned representatives of New Jersey's transit authority and the leadership of Amtrak, the railroad's owner, and promised immediate action.

“We will fix these issues and get to a point where operations are significantly better than they have been in recent weeks. And we hope this is an anomaly that people don't have to experience again,” said Amtrak CEO Anthony Coscia.

Preventive checks are being stepped up, with a focus on the overhead lines that supply electricity to trains and the pantographs above the locomotives that draw the electricity.

However, authorities admit that it will take years to replace the aging lines between Central Jersey and Manhattan.

And the construction of two new tunnels under the Hudson will take fourteen years. Critics say the work could and should have been completed long ago.

“It was easier to neglect these things. It was easier to let them go and think we would catch up later. And we are paying for it,” said Micah Rasmussen of Rider University.

The portal bridge will be replaced by a fixed span and is expected to be completed within 18 months.

“This will replace approximately three and a half miles of overhead wires and signals right here in the most important part of this system, between Newark and New York, Penn Station,” said Stephen Gardner, CEO of Amtrak.

Governor Murphy has increased funding for NJ Transit and passed a tax on the state's wealthiest corporations that will do even more.

When asked when he last took a train, he told reporters it was a while ago.

“I have to get back into it. My experience has been excellent,” Murphy said.

Drivers we spoke to say the governor needs to get out more often.

“'Come along and ride the train.' That's what I would say. 'Come along and ride the train and see if you have fun and see for yourself what you can do.' What's wrong with that, right?” said one commuter.

ALSO READ: Trouble ahead, trouble afterward for frustrated NJ Transit commuters

NJ Burkett has the latest information.

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