Stuck in the dark, hundreds of people were crammed aboard the 7:20 p.m. New Jersey Transit train to Trenton on July 31, as it sat in the tunnel beneath the Hudson River. They just wanted to get back to their homes in the suburbs, and the railroad that they depended on failed them in epic fashion, leaving them stuck under the river for two full hours. In an extra indignity, they’d bought their tickets just after a 15 percent fare increase on July 1, meant to patch NJ Transit’s threadbare post-pandemic finances. NJ Transit blamed Amtrak because its ancient power system had failed. Amtrak blamed NJ Transit because its 50-year-old train wouldn’t start after the electricity came back on. Afterwards, the commuter railroad nonetheless defended itself. An unidentified spokesman wrote the following email to a reporter, recently obtained under New Jersey’s open-records law: “NJ TRANSIT operates nearly 700 trains a day, and our latest on-time performance data from June indicates our trains were on-time 83% of the time, adjusted to 92.3% when you account for issues related to Amtrak infrastructure. This is far from disastrous.” They might as well have decided to challenge the existence of gravity.