Irene Khavin has commuted to work on the Manayunk/Norristown line for most of the past 20 years. She’s very familiar with the ups and downs of riding Regional Rail — the occasional cancellations, delays and other snafus that happen from time to time.
But a couple weeks ago, a shortage of train cars one evening created a level of crowding and anxiety she’d rarely ever seen.
“Some people who wanted to get on the train to get home could not — like, physically could not — get onto the train. It was stressful,” said Khavin, a Manayunk resident who works at a University of Pennsylvania immunology lab. “Even if you’re not the one who’s stuck outside the train, it’s still scary when you feel tensions rising around you and you’re packed in like sardines with a lot of other people.”
For about three weeks in August, SEPTA canceled and shortened scores of trains so it could pull out cars for inspections, following two train fires earlier this year. Those disruptions ended last week, but Khavin said they seem to reflect a broader degradation of the system.
“Over the past six months, there have been more difficulties with delays, cancelations, overcrowded trains,” she said.
Regional Rail has typically been relatively reliable, with fewer than 1% of trips reported as “missed” due to operator absences or other reasons over most of the past seven years, according to SEPTA data. But that figure suddenly spiked to 4% in January and, after subsiding, jumped again to 2% in May, the most recent month for which data is available.
On-time performance has also been on an erratic downward trend for the past 3 years, sinking from averages of over 90% of trains arriving on time, to only about 80% in December and again in February and June.
“I used to be able to just kind of take for granted that, with rare exceptions, the regularly scheduled trains would be more or less on time,” Khavin said. “Now I am finding it to be an ongoing daily worry: Am I going to be able to get home on time? What’s going to be the situation with the trains today?”
Deep rail cuts loom
The sense of Regional Rail’s frailty has been heightened by the expectation that service reductions and fare hikes could happen any day, as SEPTA struggles to close a deficit amid a state budget impasse that just entered its third month.
The cuts and price increases had been scheduled to take effect Monday, but were put on hold by a judge after a group of riders sued to block them. The changes remain suspended until at least Thursday, when the case returns to court.
The transit agency has been planning to reduce the frequency or “headway” of midday and evening trains from hourly to every two hours, which could impact the growing number of occasional riders who travel at off-peak hours, such as people who work from home and run errands at lunch time.
The planned 21.5% systemwide fare increase would also hit them hard. The base weekday Zone 1 fare would rise from $4 to $5 using SEPTA Key and from $6 to $7 when purchased on board. The cost of the most expensive monthly rail pass, the Anywhere Trailpass, would jump from $204 to $255.
The experience of past fare hikes has shown that Regional Rail passengers are more sensitive to higher costs than people using buses and other modes, said Matt Gates, associate director for travel trends and forecasts at the Delaware Valley Regional Planning Commission. Raising fares could be the final straw that pushes some frequent riders to switch to driving or taking Uber rides.
“Combined with the off-peak headways going to two hours, if you’re not working a traditional 9-to-5 job, maybe Regional Rail’s a less viable alternative,” he said. “We’re thinking that maybe the ridership on Regional Rail is going to take the biggest hit,” compared to other parts of the system.
The consequences for rail will be far worse if SEPTA’s budget crisis isn’t resolved by January. The agency says it will eliminate five Regional Rail lines and stop all train service daily at 9 p.m., which would render the system unusable for many people and spark a “death spiral” of declining ridership and revenue, SEPTA officials say.
“It’s sad. As much as people like to complain about SEPTA when anything is less than perfect, overall Philly has really good public transit, or had really good public transit, for a city its size,” Khavin said. “Seeing the recent cuts and worrying about whether that’s going to be permanent or whether it will be reversed — it makes me worry for the future of Philadelphia, because so many people rely on it, and now can’t.”
Canceled, canceled, canceled
Beyond the uncertainty over the possible fare hike and less-frequent trains, riders have other reasons to fret over rail’s future.
Federal investigators are looking into the two fires, which occurred on 50-year-old Silverliner IV cars. But they still haven’t figured out what caused the blazes, leaving the risk of more major disruptions unclear.
The first fire occurred on the evening of Feb. 6 near Crum Lynne Station in Ridley Park, on the Trenton/Newark line. An engineer had reported the train was not getting up to speed, and that a fault light had come on, according to a National Transportation Safety Board report. A maintenance team that inspected it at a train yard reported that three cars were “bad,” and an engineer later reported a strong burning smell, but the train was kept in operation.
As the train departed Crum Lynne, an engineer saw smoke, stopped the train, and saw that the lead railcar was on fire. Four crew members and 325 passengers were evacuated and no one was hurt, but two train cars, with a replacement cost of $10 million, were engulfed in flames and destroyed.
A second, similar fire burned two rail cars at Paoli station in Chester County on July 22. A SEPTA employee suffered from smoke inhalation and a firefighter was treated for injuries on the scene.
As part of the NTSB and Federal Rail Administration investigation, SEPTA crews last month spent three weeks checking on the warning lights on its Silverliner IVs, which turn on when brakes overheat or other problems arise, spokesman Andrew Busch said.
They removed cars for inspection when their lights went on, leading to about three weeks of major frustrations for commuters. A number of trains were reduced from the usual four or five cars to just two, leading to the crowding Khavin experienced, and many trains were canceled.
“Friday: Canceled going to and going home,” one rider wrote on Reddit. “Monday: Canceled going home. Tuesday: Canceled going home.”
“I split my day and leave half day so I don’t get stranded. That’s if I even get there on my morning commute,” another wrote. “Do not want to take MFL to 69th then 105 all the way out to Paoli, but it’s looking likely, which sucks. Been looking for a new job, and now really searching so I get rid of this commute.”
Billions in capital needs
The inspections didn’t illuminate the cause of the fires, Busch said. But as the NTSB investigation continues, SEPTA has focused on the importance of responding quickly to signs of problems.
“We have done some reminders to the crews and to supervisors that whenever there’s an odor, if there’s an indication that something might be happening, that trains have got to come out of service right away,” he said.
SEPTA wants to spend $1.8 billion to replace its 225 Silverliner IVs, but it would first need to obtain the funds — probably from the federal government, at least in part — and then launch a 5- to 7-year procurement process.
Meanwhile, Congress and the Trump administration have been canceling funding for transportation projects, and Pennsylvania legislators are talking about raiding the state’s transportation capital fund to temporarily bridge the operating deficits at SEPTA and other transit agencies.
SEPTA has also separately been ordered by a different agency, the Federal Transit Administration, to conduct a rare, sweeping overhaul of its safety programs following a series of crashes involving buses and trolleys in 2022 and 2023, including one in which a passenger died.
The FTA does not oversee Regional Rail, “but they certainly will look at how we’re doing things across the authority and see if there’s anything we need to be improving on,” Busch said. That safety program remains underway.
SEPTA’s capital budget this year calls for spending about $145 million, including putting tens of millions toward long-range projects to buy new trolleys, zero-emission buses and Market-Frankford line trains. Busch said it also has a $10 billion to-do list of “state of good repair” projects that would bring all its infrastructure to optimal working order, including a long list of vehicle and station improvements.
The agency additionally has a stalled initiative called Reimagining Regional Rail, which envisions converting the commuter lines into more of a “lifestyle transit network” that is useful to more people at more times throughout the week. Rough concepts released a few years ago suggested running shorter trains more frequently throughout the day, perhaps as often as every 15 minutes, or running more express trains.
SEPTA hasn’t chosen a final option or finalized the infrastructure work that would be needed, such as possible higher platforms and new vehicles. Unlike the agency’s bus network redesign, which is ready to go pending resolution of the budget crisis, it’s unclear when Reimaging Regional Rail might happen, Busch said.
“If we can get funding secured, we can start moving ahead with it. We would still have some work that needs to be done on determining the timeline,” he said. “The status of the fleet is an issue there as well, but it’s something that we certainly plan to pursue.”
