Thousands of commuters into New York City confronted another round of potentially heavy delays on the Long Island Rail Road on Tuesday morning, a day after an electrical short in a pair of cables sparked a fire in a control tower, causing an almost total shutdown of train traffic for part of the day.
The railroad canceled 33 westbound trains into the city from Long Island — about one-fourth of its normal morning rush-hour traffic — and warned of “significant schedule changes and delays” for the morning and evening rushes.
Rail service was also temporarily suspended along the busy Northeast Corridor for the second time in less than two weeks because of an Amtrak power problem. New Jersey Transit officials said the problem was affecting Northeast Corridor, North Jersey Coast Line and Midtown Direct trains.
Trains along the Northeast Corridor were stopped between 7:45 and 8:45 a.m., said a spokeswoman for New Jersey Transit. Although trains were now headed into Penn Station, commuters were warned to expect delays of more than an hour.
The electrical travel chaos on Monday offered a frustrating reminder of the fragility of a rail network still dependent on antiquated equipment.
Embedded along the railroad tracks by Jamaica Station, and soaked by rain from the night before, two or more cables shorted out around 11 a.m., the authorities said, sending a pulse of electricity into a nearby train control tower and setting fire to the century-old equipment inside.
It seems improbable that a piece of ancient machinery, a contraption of levers and pulleys designed in 1913, would be critical to the successful operation of one of the nation’s largest commuter railroads.
But the machinery, which remained on fire for about an hour, controls the 155 track switches at a crucial choke point: Jamaica Station, which 10 of the railroad’s 11 branches must travel through to get in and out of New York City.
With no way to direct trains onto their proper routes, railroad workers scrambled onto the tracks, spikes and mallets in hand, to lock the switches into place manually so that trains could travel by, a practice known in railroad parlance as “block and spike.”
For several hours, nearly the entire railroad ground to a halt. By Monday evening, about 60 percent of service was restored, but about 120,000 commuters faced delays, shuttle buses and altered routes on their journey home.
“They have us waiting forever,” Racquel Humphrey, 22, who was leaning against a pole in Pennsylvania Station with her 10-month-old baby, said after waiting four hours for a train to Hempstead. “I’m frustrated.” Her train was later canceled.
Seventy-five percent of service was expected to be restored for the Tuesday morning rush, but officials could not say how long it would be until full service would be restored. “We have significant damage to the tower switching system, and we are expecting delays for Tuesday as well,” said Joe Calderone, a railroad spokesman.
The fire was a gloomy reminder to New Yorkers that the region’s mass transit network, although it serves more passengers than any system in the nation, still functions very much as it did decades ago. In 2005, a blaze in an underground relay room destroyed ancient equipment, snarling two of the city’s largest subway lines. A 2004 fire in a tunnel leading to Penn Station halted commuter train service for hours.
“We are an older infrastructure; we know that we need infrastructure renewal,” said Helena E. Williams, the president of the Long Island Rail Road, at a news conference. “Commuter rail is facing that throughout the United States.”
Officials were still investigating the precise cause of the power surge, but they thought the heavy rainstorms early Monday morning could be a possible culprit. The cables that malfunctioned are less than a decade old, but the complex switching equipment was last updated in the 1930s. It was scheduled to be replaced in October with a modern computerized system.
Ms. Williams said she believed the railroad had replacement parts on hand for the antiquated equipment.
Until the repairs are fully completed, Ms. Williams said, passengers will manage to make their way from home and back. “Even if it means less service, it’s still train service,” she said.
At Jamaica Station on Monday evening, commuters seemed calm, and the beverage cart did a brisk business on the platform.
Ludlow St. John, 49, a Verizon technician, was waiting for a transfer to a Hempstead train that was running a few minutes late. He had already faced an accumulated delay of about an hour, but the wait, he said, did not rank among the worst holdups he had experienced on the railroad. “It’s a slight delay,” he said.
George Rodriguez, a telephone technician trying to get home to Huntington, was similarly unruffled, despite a 45-minute delay. Whenever there are problems on the Long Island Rail Road, he said with a shrug, “we just kind of wing it.”
