About 700 passengers were trapped on a disabled NJ Transit train early Saturday after an Amtrak power issue caused the train to lose electricity and air conditioning.
Many of the passengers were fans returning from the Chris Brown and Usher concert at MetLife Stadium.
The FDNY received a call about the disabled Jersey-bound train at Penn Station at 1:46 a.m., with 21 units and 79 fire and EMS personnel responding, and the incident was brought under control at 3:04 a.m.
The train was stopped in a lit area outside the Hudson River tunnel and away from the platform when it lost power, and the outage lasted approximately one hour.
Passengers said they smelled something burning before everything went dark.
“We were on the train and we smelled smoke like rubber burning,” a woman recorded in a video posted to YouTube. “Then all of a sudden the lights flickered and the train stopped.”
The conductor told them the power was out but offered no other information.
“He told us that the power was out and we just waited and waited and waited,” the woman explained in the video. “Finally they got a booster train or something to hook up and to drag us back here two hours later.”
NJ Transit personnel initially planned to walk passengers back to the station manually.
“People were starting to get to the point they were starting to bug out,” the woman added.
Ernesto Valverde, 37, who attended the concert with his wife, said the train had broken down less than a mile from the platform.
“It took … two minutes to go from where we were to the platform,” Valverde told The Post. “So we literally were stuck there for two hours in heat and humidity, essentially, for what amounted to a less than a mile trip.”
Valverde vented his frustration on X afterward.
“@NJTRANSIT you are deserving of an A grade on awful service and unpreparedness,” he wrote. “Stuck less than a mile from NY Penn and there is no crew ready to pull us in. Make it make sense.”
Valverde noted there was a diabetic passenger on board.
“Thank goodness for the riders on board that are actually ready to jump into action,” his post added.
Damara Lee, 49, didn’t arrive home to Far Rockaway until 4 a.m.
“It was hell,” Lee said. “We lost power. The train got hot. It was bad. It was hot, sweaty, it wasn’t needed.”
Lee said the experience dampened what had been a great show.
“It took the beauty from the concert,” she said, noting the concert itself had also been delayed due to inclement weather. “The concert was great but the commute… What a night, let me tell you.”
One unidentified passenger described the conditions aboard to ABC7.
“It was terrible, people were flipping out a little bit, it was very hot,” they said. “By the time the cops came we were already exhausted and hot. They did open the doors but this was just before the train moved, see I have my little towel? So it was very hot in there.”
NJ Transit blamed an Amtrak power issue for disabling the train.
In the viral moment early Saturday, hundreds of exhausted concert-goers watched as rescue personnel escorted them off a sweltering train stranded on the Northeast Corridor line returning from MetLife Stadium. The train had stalled at around 1:45 a.m. with all passengers trapped inside without electricity or air conditioning.
The train was stopped in a lit area outside the Hudson River tunnel and away from the platform when it lost power.
After nearly two hours of sitting in extreme heat with no ventilation, the passengers were finally led to safety at Manhattan’s Moynihan Train Hall platform.
NJ Transit did not respond to requests for comment at the time of the incident.