WASHINGTON, D.C. — Commuters to New York received some overdue welcome news over the weekend. Anticipating substantial delays on Monday, New Jersey Transit pre-emptively allowed them to use their train tickets on private buses and ferries instead. By this point, rail-service interruptions had become so predictable that New Jerseyites were probably happy to traverse the Hudson River by boat. Four of the five workdays last week brought long delays on the line, largely the product of electrical failures in the octogenarian overhead wires running through the centenarian train tunnel under the Hudson.

Chris Christie, New Jersey’s governor, responded by excoriating Amtrak, which owns most of the tracks and equipment along the line, for its “indifference to New Jersey commuters and its abject neglect of the infrastructure that New Jersey and our entire region relies upon”. That was a bit rich coming from the man who, in an effort to bolster his reputation as a tough-talking scourge of wasteful spending ahead of his presidential run, scuttled plans for a new tunnel under the Hudson. That project would have helped bring America’s dominant rail corridor into, well, the 20th century at least. Instead, the region is left with hopeless bottlenecks […]