Amtrak Suspends Service Between New York and New Haven Because of Fire

The blaze was apparently connected to an Amtrak substation in the Bronx. The operator said it expected normal service to resume at 2 p.m. on Wednesday.

Amtrak suspended service between New York City and New Haven, Conn., just before the evening rush hour on Tuesday after a fire in the Bronx cut off power to trains in the area, officials said.

The railroad operator said Tuesday night that it expected to resume normal operations at around 2 p.m. on Wednesday. Amtrak encouraged those traveling between New York and New Haven to take Metro-North trains, where their tickets would be honored because of the disruption.

In an earlier news release, Amtrak cited “reports of a brush fire” east of Pennsylvania Station in Manhattan as the reason for the power outage. The release did not provide additional details, but an Amtrak spokesman said that initial reports indicated the fire was connected to a transformer at an Amtrak substation.

Philip O’Brien, a spokesman for Con Edison, said that the fire started around 2:30 p.m. as Amtrak employees were working on a high-voltage feeder cable at a substation in the Parkchester section of the Bronx that is near a Con Edison substation.

A spark ignited material on the ground, and flames soon spread to a parking lot on the Con Edison property, Mr. O’Brien said. No one affiliated with Con Edison was injured, but two or three employees’ cars were damaged, he added. No Con Edison customers were affected, he said.

Kevin Woods, the Fire Department’s chief of operations, said at a news conference late Tuesday that firefighters had responded to two fires at about the same time in roughly the same section of the Bronx, one at the Amtrak substation and another at a large warehouse.

Chief Woods said fire marshals were investigating what caused the fires or whether they were related. There was “brush burning” outside the warehouse, but it was unclear what role it had played in that blaze, he added.

Hundreds of fires have flared up in New Jersey, New York and Connecticut recently as a record-breaking season of drought continues, with the dead leaves on the ground and still clinging to trees acting as kindling, and gusty winds fanning the flames.

The National Weather Service issued a red flag warning for a broad swath of the New York City metropolitan region on Tuesday, indicating that a combination of strong winds, low relative humidity and dry fuels created a significantly heightened risk of fire.

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