Nobody ever thinks about electrical systems until something goes wrong with them. Electrical power is very much on the minds of Long Island commuters, as an electrical short in two cables submerged in water from heavy rains apparently fried some 1930s-era electrical controls, shutting down the Long Island Rail Road yesterday for hours and sending 130,000 commuters scrambling for alternative means to get in and out of the Big Apple.
An article in The New York Times said the fire in a control tower crippled 155 track switches at a station used by multiple branch lines of the Long Island Railroad, and that because the equipment is so antiquated workers had to scramble onto the tracks to manually set the switches.
About the Author
Jim Lucy Blog
Chief Editor
Jim Lucy has been wandering through the electrical market for more than 30 years, most of the time as an editor for Electrical Wholesaling, Electrical Marketing newsletter and CEE News. During that time he and the editorial team for the publications have won numerous national awards for their coverage of the electrical business. He showed an early interest in electricity, when as a youth he had an idea for a hot dog cooker. Unfortunately, the first crude prototype malfunctioned and the arc nearly blew him out of his parents' basement. Before becoming an editor for Electrical Wholesaling magazine and Electrical Marketing, he earned a BA degree in journalism and a MA in communications from Glassboro State College, Glassboro, NJ., which is formerly best known as the site of the 1967 summit meeting between President Lyndon Johnson and Russian Premier Aleksei Nikolayevich Kosygin, and now best known as the New Jersey state college that changed its name in 1992 to Rowan University because of a generous $100 million donation by N.J. zillionaire industrialist Henry Rowan. Jim is a Brooklyn-born Jersey Guy happily transplanted in the fertile plains of Kansas for the past 20 years.