NEW HAVEN — The Metro-North New Haven line with service to and from New York City was fully restored Monday morning, the railroad announced.
“Regular New Haven Line Service is in effect Monday morning, October 7, following the successful activation of a major new electrical substation at Mount Vernon,” the railroad announced on its website.
Amtrak also announced on Saturday that its Acela train service between Boston and New York City returned to its full schedule on Sunday.
Metro-North and Amtrak Acela service have been hobbled since Sept. 25, when power from the Mount Vernon, N.Y. substation that fed electricity to the New Haven Line failed. Crews since then have been hurrying to complete a new substation that already was under construction.
“Everybody has been working like crazy,” Metro-North spokeswoman Marjorie Anders said Saturday. “It was a huge accomplishment. This wasn’t supposed to be finished until mid-October.”
Metro-North was in the midst of a $50 million project to replace the 1977 substation when the power crisis hit, Anders said. Con Edison had taken one of the substation’s two feeder lines out of service in mid-September as part of the construction job, and the other one evidently failed on Sept. 25.
“We went through all kinds of testing in the summer to be sure there’d be enough power with just one line. Con Ed and Metro-North determined that one was just fine — but halfway through the project it went out,” she said Saturday.
The power failure created havoc for Metro-North and Acela riders. A patchwork of portable transformers in Larchmont, N.Y., has allowed severely limited service between Stamford and Grand Central Terminal, and the railroad will keep that system in place for now as a backup, Anders said.
Metro-North officials had said this past week that they expected full service to return Monday, provided the new power equipment tested well.
On Friday, Metro-North also announced that it would be implementing a credit program for inconvenienced customers.
Jim Cameron, chairman of the Connecticut Metro-North Rail Commuter Council, on Saturday praised Malloy for publicly pressing the railroad to issue refunds.
“We need to look at why this happened and take steps to make sure it doesn’t happen again,” Malloy said.