NJ Transit and Amtrak are discussing reducing service at night and on weekends to give work crews more time to repair and improve infrastructure that officials blame for service outages this summer, top agency officials told House lawmakers Thursday.

The hearing before the parliament’s transportation committee comes as officials seek to improve system reliability following security measures. Second-worst “summer from hell” under Governor Phil MurphyThis saw on-time performance fall to near-record levels for management and led to the cancellation of 1,820 trains.

“To be clear, this is incredibly important work and the stakes are high. “It is almost impossible to overstate the importance of the Northeast Corridor, not only to the millions of passengers and intercity rail customers who rely on it every day, but also to our national economy,” said NJ Transit CEO Kevin Corbett. “As one of the world’s largest economic markets, the northeast is our nation’s international It is the key to competitiveness.”

According to Corbett, agencies increased inspections and other maintenance efforts in response to summer outages; He replaced more than 2,000 components on the overhead lines that power NJ Transit trains and inspected 240 miles of track running between Trenton and New York Penn Station.

But Corbett and Amtrak CEO Stephen Gardner warned that other needed maintenance work would require shutting down portions of the line along the Northeast Corridor during service hours, with work crews having little time to make necessary upgrades or repairs with full operations.

“Much of the work cannot be done efficiently when the railway is operating at today’s service levels,” Gardner told the committee. “Amtrak, in particular, will require longer operating hours overnight and on weekends, sometimes when trains are not running, and longer periods of time when individual tracks will need to be out of service to get the work done.”

Gardner said officials are still working on the timing of the track closures, but acknowledged that temporary closures will cause some inconvenience in the short term.

Message for poor NJ Transit riders: Fixes are coming… eventually

Amtrak owns the tracks and other infrastructure used by NJ Transit trains on the Northeast Corridor, the continent’s busiest commuter rail line, and the state transportation agency pays Amtrak about $200 million a year to use the tracks, overhead cables and other parts of the railroad. network.

Corbett and Gardner told the committee that much of this infrastructure is outdated — in some cases more than a century old — and increasingly unreliable due to decades of disinvestment.

“I want to remind everyone that we rely on legacy infrastructure that is grossly inadequate in terms of capacity for the volume of trains we operate on what is essentially the busiest mainline railroad in all of North America,” Gardner said.

They urged lawmakers to continue investing in capital improvements, noting that state matching funds are key to securing competitive federal grants that currently provide four federal dollars for every one spent by states.

They said state matching funds are key to securing billions of federal dollars provided under the infrastructure law President Joe Biden signed in 2021.

“Having the opportunity to have us as partners to invest 20% and get 80% back, in addition to New Jersey Transit’s regular investments, literally allows New Jersey to experience well over $10 billion in net federal revenue “We’re only going to invest here in the next decade,” Gardner said.