Electrical power was lost twice for at total of more than two hours Tuesday afternoon in parts of Union Station, darkening the station’s passenger boarding areas and delaying departures of some commuter and Amtrak trains until repairs were made, officials said.
The first outage lasted from 2 to about 4 p.m. Percy Springer, a Union Station mechanic, said a steam pipe broke about 2 p.m. in a basement under the station’s train tracks, forcing a piece of the pipe into a nearby electrical transformer.
“It put a hole the size of a basketball in the transformer,” Springer said.
Power was restored to the darkened parts of the building about 4 p.m. after workers rearranged wiring to bypass the transformer, he said.
“It was a mini-crisis,” he said.
Then, about 5 p.m., power was lost to two signal systems that control movement of trains into and out of the station, said Frank Malone, a spokesman for the Metra commuter rail system. Power was restored to those systems by 5:30 p.m., he said.
Marc Magliari, a spokesman for Amtrak, which owns the station, said the first outage affected lights on train platforms and in hallways leading to the platforms but not in the station’s main waiting area or in the office tower above the station.
He said passengers were not allowed into the unlighted areas of the station for safety reasons, and thus they were not able to board their trains. Magliari said about 300 passengers were delayed boarding four Amtrak trains bound for San Francisco, St. Louis, Milwaukee, and Seattle and Portland,
When the station’s main waiting area filled with passengers, officials decided to close access to the station for part of the two-hour period to prevent overcrowding, he said.
Magliari said repairs would be made during the night to prevent further disruption of service.
Malone said the first outage caused a one-hour delay in the departure of a train bound for Orland Park that normally leaves at 3 p.m. Otherwise, Malone said, there were minimal or no delays on three other scheduled departures before 4 p.m., nor did passengers have difficulty boarding those trains.
The 5 p.m. electrical malfunction caused delays of up to 30 minutes in the departure of westbound commuter trains, he said.
An Amtrak passenger who was changing trains at Union Station described the station as “a madhouse” during the first outage.
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“Everybody was coming down the escalators at once, none of the trackside boards (identifying which train is on which track) were lighted, so nobody knew where they were going,” said Densil Lee, of Placentia, Calif., who is retired from the insurance industry and frequently travels on Amtrak trains.
“There were a lot of (station employees) milling around. You could tell they were trying to figure out what was happening,” Lee said.