Amtrak restores full service between NYC and New Rochelle

Full Amtrak service between New York Penn Station and New Rochelle was restored Wednesday evening, following a transformer fire Tuesday that halted trains on their tracks.
Work crews were making emergency track repairs to the Hell Gate Line Wednesday morning, and Amtrak had been hoping to restore full service by 2 p.m., officials from the federal passenger railroad said in a statement.
Power was ultimately restored to one of the line’s two tracks around 2:50 p.m., with full service returning shortly before 5:30 p.m.
Metro-North Railroad had been cross-honoring Amtrak tickets until the restoration of one track of northbound service eased the commuter crunch.
Service came to a halt on Amtrak’s Hell Gate Line on Tuesday afternoon when an oil-cooled electrical transformer in the Bronx caught fire around 2 p.m. The Hell Gate segment links Penn Station and New Rochelle, and connects to points north, including New Haven.
Amid current area drought conditions that have seen scores of recent brush fires, the transformer blaze spread to brush along the tracks and a nearby parking lot, requiring 60 FDNY personnel to bring it under control.
“It took us quite a while to extinguish that fire,” FDNY Chief of Operations Kevin Woods said late Tuesday.
“We had to have all train traffic stopped,” Woods said. “We had to have [power removed from] the overhead catenary wires. We needed power also removed from the transformer.”
FDNY teams were simultaneously combating a massive warehouse fire nearby, about a quarter mile away. Woods said the blazes were “two separate and distinct fires,” but that an investigation was ongoing to determine if they were related.
“It was a very, very heavy fire in both the [warehouse] and the transformer,” Woods said.