PHILADELPHIA — The Southeastern Pennsylvania Transportation Authority has readjusted commuter rail operations following Friday’s reopening of Interstate following a June 11 bridge collapse.
SEPTA will continue to offer two additional morning trains and one additional evening train on its Trenton Line, while maintaining additional seating capacity on that line, as well as the West Trenton and Fox Chase lines.
Also, the Cynwyd Regional Rail Line, which had been replaced with bus service to free up equipment and staff for other lines, has been restored as of today (Monday, June 26).
Original estimates called for a section of I-95 to be closed for months after the bridge collapsed as a result of a fire involving a gasoline tank truck [see “SEPTA moves to increase rail service …,” Trains News Wire, June 11, 2023]. But a temporary repair, in which a three-lane roadway was built atop a wall of foam glass, was completed in just 12 days, the website Billy Penn reports. Work will now begin on a permanent, full-width overpass to replace the collapsed bridge; that project will take several months.
Anyone want to guess how the NEC would be faring if a similar bridge collapse had taken out all four mains, wires down, catenary supports destroyed? I guarantee nothing anywhere near what’s been done to reopen I-95. After the usual posturing by empty-headed U.S. and state pols who have never and never will ride Amtrak for a legit transportation purpose, Amtrak would have been left to clean up the mess by itself. The outage would have disappeared from the local and national news. And Amtrak would today have no estimate of when the railroad would resume operations.
They did it somewhat how a railroad would. They built a shoo-fly.
I-95 has 8 traffic lanes (4 NB, 4 SB) plus a breakdown lane each direction and a median with barrier.
Both directions needed replaced. After the demolition, they built Phase One: a temporary roadway with 3 lanes each way and a narrow median with barrier. This restores traffic.
They are now building Phase Two: construct the two outermost lanes and breakdown lane each way. Phase Three will be to remove the temporary roadway between the new outside lanes.
Phase Four is to construct the two inside lanes and a normal-sized medial and barrier.