Amtrak

Amtrak service between Washington and New York and Philadelphia and Harrisburg, Pa., was back to normal for the evening rush hour Tuesday after an early-morning service disruption. About 30 Amtrak trains in the Northeast were delayed from 11 minutes to almost two hours Tuesday because of a low-voltage problem. The disruption began shortly before 8 a.m., and power was restored about an hour later. The cause of the outage was under investigation. The outage also disrupted MARC service on the Penn Line, which is operated by Amtrak.

James McCommons isn't a starry-eyed romantic about railroads. He's not a dreamer who envisions Maglev trains racing from city to city at 300 mph or more. But he does think that passenger rail service — that unwanted stepchild of American transportation — is a vital part of America's future. So he spent a year riding the rails of this country studying how that might be done. Then the veteran journalist wrote a book describing the grim reality of life aboard today's American trains and outlining a vision for how they might be restored to respectability — if not their former glory.

A motorcyclist suffered non-life-threatening injuries after he collided with a car off Route 170 near Amtrak Way on Friday morning, police said. The accident caused airport officials to reroute buses from the Amtrak station, a spokeswoman for BWI Thurgood Marshall Airport said. But by 10 a.m., roads were reopened and the scene was cleared, said a spokesperson with the Maryland Transportation Authority Police. Police said the crash happened about 100 yards north of Amtrak Way at about 7:25 a.m. The motorcycle rider was taken by ambulance to Maryland Shock Trauma and the driver of the car was treated at the scene, police said.

Spurred by recent service disruptions on MARC trains, the Maryland Transit Administration has extended the hours of its customer call center and put other measures in place to respond to customer concerns. Starting immediately, call center hours will roughly match the hours the commuter rail service operates. The center will remain open from 6 a.m. to 11 p.m. Monday through Friday "until further notice." The center had closed at 7 p.m. — long before the last MARC trains of the day left their stations.

In the wake of recent disruptions in MARC trains that have angered hundreds of passengers and frustrated state officials, Amtrak announced Wednesday new measures to answer critics and improve commuter rail service in Maryland. Seeking to make amends for a June 21 incident in which MARC passengers on the Penn Line were left stranded on a train in sweltering heat, Amtrak President Joseph Boardman said Wednesday that no longer will the railroad bypass disabled trains. Boardman made the promise at a meeting with MARC passengers at Union Station in Washington as part of the railroad's continuing response to the "hell train" incident and other service lapses that have focused attention on the commuter rail service and the national railroad that operates the Penn Line.

Calling the service on the Amtrak-operated MARC Penn Line "unacceptable," Maryland's top transportation official demanded that the national passenger railroad conduct a "top to bottom review" of its MARC operations to prevent a recurrence of lapses that have plagued the service in recent weeks. The statement by Maryland Transportation Secretary Beverley K. Swaim-Staley came the day after she was aboard a northbound Penn Line train that overshot a scheduled stop at the MARC station in Odenton — forcing passengers to continue to the BWI Airport station to catch a southbound train back to their destination.

If the 900 passengers stranded Monday for two hours in the sweltering heat of a MARC train had a dollar for all the apologies they have received, they'd at least be close to a decent cappuccino. The heads of Amtrak and the Maryland Transit Administration have expressed their mea culpas, and Gov. Martin O'Malley picked up the theme with an "I care" trip to D.C. Thursday morning, but all are a little short on explanations. What is this, a major airline? To be stuck that long on a stalled northbound commuter train just eight minutes outside Washington's Union Station is déjà vu for the tarmac-sitters among us. But at least there's an air passenger bill of rights.

Maryland Transit Administration and Amtrak officials are trying to determine why a MARC train packed with about 1,000 commuters from Washington shut down Monday evening, leaving passengers stranded in the train in sweltering heat for about two hours. MTA Administrator Ralign T. Wells said he spoke with the president of Amtrak Tuesday morning to express his concern about how the incident was handled. He said the MTA, Amtrak and the Federal Railroad Administration will launch of formal investigation of what happened.

Maryland Transit Administration and Amtrak officials struggled Tuesday to explain how they could have left a MARC train packed with nearly 1,000 commuters stranded north of Washington in sweltering heat for about two hours Monday night until frustrated passengers removed the windows and summoned paramedics. But even as Amtrak President Joseph Boardman and MTA chief Ralign T. Wells delivered apologies to MARC riders, problems continued. Amtrak, which owns the Penn Line and staffs the trains, reported a 24-minute power loss at Washington's Union Station, causing a delay to all its trains leaving the capital Tuesday evening.