Day after: LIRR probes signal failure

The $56 million signal system that the LIRR last year touted as the future of train movement failed in all sorts of ways Thursday, when a single lightning bolt paralyzed the continent's largest commuter railway and stranded hundreds of customers on trains for hours.

After the Long Island Rail Road resumed largely normal service Friday morning, LIRR president Helena Williams apologized to riders for the Thursday evening commute and announced that the agency was launching an investigation to determine why the state-of-the-art signal system installed at Jamaica station last year did not do what it was supposed to.

"We need to reconstruct what we did in an organized way," Williams said Friday. "I clearly understand the frustration of our customers. . . . We would never put people on a train only to not see them make it through a route."

A preliminary LIRR investigation showed that the lightning bolt struck a railing on a metal "hut" near Jamaica's Jay Tower. The shed houses the computer-based switch and signal system governing all train movement just west of Jamaica.

The grounded hut was designed to absorb and disburse the surge of electricity without harming the signal controls, but "the lightning protection clearly wasn't adequate last night," said Raymond Kenny, senior vice president of operations, on Friday.

With the signals and switches west of Jamaica not working, the LIRR was able to restore some service from Penn Station and Atlantic Terminal in Brooklyn by manually setting track switches.

LIRR workers urgently ran diagnostic software designed to quickly identify a problem, but, Williams said, the program reported "false positives" -- telling them everything was fine when it clearly was not.

It was not until crews began manually checking and replacing various components of the system that they found 13 microprocessor components that were fried by the lightning. The damage took out both the main signal system and the backup system.

Second tower fails

In the process of trying to repair the problems at Jay Tower, Jamaica's other tower controlling switches and signals east of the station, Hall Tower, also went out -- forcing the LIRR to completely shut down, even as several trains were already out in the system.

Williams said the LIRR is still investigating why Hall Tower failed, but confirmed that the work being done at the western tower "clearly had an impact" on the eastern tower, which apparently did not sustain any damage from lightning.

Williams said the new switching and signal system was designed to isolate problems to individual locations so as not to bring down the entire system, as happened on Thursday.

Russell Glorioso, spokesman for Ansaldo STS -- the Genoa, Italy-based company that designed Jamaica's signal system -- said he had been briefed about the LIRR's problems but "did not know enough" to address specifics. He said the company's systems are tested to withstand lightning strikes.

"We were working with Long Island overnight and now to make sure we remedy the situation," Glorioso said. "At the end of the day, they're our customers and we want to do right by them and, even further than that, we want to do right by their customers."

Williams said an Ansaldo crew will visit Jamaica on Monday to inspect the system. The LIRR also hired railroad consultant Systra, of Little Falls, N.J., to examine how the LIRR can better protect its signal and switching system from lightning strikes.

"We are a big, open system. . . . We work hard to ensure that things are grounded so that we don't attract lightning, but we still get lightning strikes," Williams said. "But you don't throw up your hands. You look at what you can do to add lightning protections."

Union chief: System fragile

Christopher Natale, general chairman of the Brotherhood of Railroad Signalmen Local 56, said Thursday night's meltdown showed how fragile Jamaica's new computer-based switching system is as compared to the "robust" mechanical system that was in place for 100 years.

"When you had the old system and you had a lightning strike, one or two things would get messed up," Natale said. "But with this system, the whole thing gets wiped out."

Williams disputed that the older system would have better withstood a lightning strike, and noted that an electrical surge at one of the towers in August of last year -- before the new system was installed -- melted hundreds of wires and took several days to repair.

Bob Lund, director of capital projects for the Southeastern Pennsylvania Transit Authority, which operates a regional rail line in the Philadelphia suburbs, said that lightning strikes that disable railroad switches are "rare" and that the structures that house the switches are designed to absorb a lightning bolt and preserve the switch system.

"If something does get in there, we may lose some components," Lund said. "But we can switch them out."

LIRR customers who endured the nightmarish Thursday commute said that while the LIRR may not be able to protect itself from Mother Nature's wrath, it could plan accordingly.

Dora DeLellis, 48, of Baldwin, boarded a 6:46 p.m. train out of Penn Station and did not get home until midnight, after catching an N4 bus at Jamaica. She was stuck on a train packed "shoulder-shoulder" just yards away from a Jamaica platform for more than three hours.

"In three hours they couldn't come up with a plan to get us off the train?" DeLellis, a tax accountant, asked. "They basically don't a plan to handle a catastrophe."

Kenny defended the decision not to try to unload passengers on stranded trains, saying doing so would have been dangerous and could have resulted in further delays.