Tri-Rail trains to resume service Wednesday after system outage, agency says

Tri-Rail trains will resume normal service Wednesday, the South Florida Regional Transportation Authority announced, after resolution of a system outage that caused major delays on Tuesday.

“A signal issue” with the dispatch system stopped all traffic on the tracks, Victor Garcia, director of public affairs for Tri-Rail, said in an email. The system went down about 3:30 p.m. Tuesday.

South Florida Regional Transportation Authority “had to make adjustments to its network infrastructure in order to resolve the issue that affected the dispatch and radio communications required to run trains,” Tri-Rail said in an email early Wednesday.

Garcia said Tuesday’s outage affected all train traffic, including Amtrak and CSX freight, on the tracks west of Interstate 95.

Jason Santos, 42, takes a Tri-Rail train from the Lake Worth station to the Fort Lauderdale area each day for work. Santos said he caught the train Tuesday night at the Cypress Creek station, and the train slowly pulled away from the station for about two minutes, then stopped.

The train didn’t move for at least an hour, he said, before moving to the Pompano Beach station where passengers were told to get off.

“There was well over 100 people sitting on the platform waiting for a train,” Santos said.

Finally, he decided to ditch the train and take an Uber with others who were stuck waiting to Lake Worth Beach. He typically would have been home about three hours earlier, he said.

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