As the holiday season approaches, passengers may be concerned about experiencing a repeat of this summer's severe delays and cancellations on NJ transit and Amtrak.

Governor Murphy met with NJ Transit and Amtrak officials today, and there may be hope with recently announced funding aimed at modernizing the aging transportation system.

But as senior correspondent Brenda Flanagan reports, the hope hangs on funding approval by the incoming Trump administration.

You can't make promises.

What you could do is you could increase your odds that you will have fewer challenges.

Governor Murphy, at a special summit of transit executives, refused to guarantee that NJ transit riders will avoid another horrible summer of hell.

But fingers crossed.

Interim inspections and repairs recently completed by Amtrak along 240 miles of track between Trenton and New York, have stabilized an antiquated system prone to breakdowns.

For now.

And we have learned more.

That, I think, is going to allow us to approach the coming year with a higher degree of certainty that we can perform as expected, officials said.

Separate investigations continue into how the commuter rail system could have failed so utterly leaving travelers stranded.

Some trains stalled for hours inside Hudson River tunnels.

Commuters furious over paying higher fares for bad service complained to members of Congress who called on both Amtrak and NJ transit to find a so-called smoking gun.

I think some people were expecting a single root cause, and I think, you know, we haven't, identified any proverbial smoking gun as what caused those series of incidents.

This fight is definitely nowhere near over.

We've got a lot more work to do.

We've got to keep cooperating.

It is not inappropriate at all for people to put pressure on Amtrak and New Jersey transit.

Amtrak just scored $112 million in federal grants to begin critical infrastructure improvements on signals, catenary wires and bridges along the Northeast Corridor in New Jersey.

But pressure to keep those federal dollars flowing will get intensely political when the Trump administration takes over in January, with what's widely regarded as a mandate to slash government spending, including transportation.

We have to do the environmental work and the design work.

And so we think there's a certainly a strong interest from what we can understand so far from the new administration to make things more efficient, to get better outcomes.

And we'll be working to try and build partnerships there to get these dollars.

The first Trump administration quashed funding for the Gateway Rail Tunnel project.

President Biden subsequently guaranteed funding for gateway.

That, at least, is solid, Murphy said.

The governor met last week with the president elect, who he maintained understands infrastructure.

And he understands the Northeast Corridor really well.

I think those are all good facts.

That's not to say, we think we can sit in our hands and let the grass grow.

We want to obligate those funds as fast as possible.

We're going to be making the strong case, about these projects and, of course, delivering the projects on time in terms of the design and pushing aggressively for the construction funding.

It is so obviously clear that one of the reasons why getting large, transformative projects completed in the United States is a function of people trying to sort of manage them within election cycles, which is not possible.

They're just things that are too big and take too long.

The group plans to meet again in April.

By then, they'll have a better idea of what kind of financial support they can expect from the new Trump administration in Newark.

I'm Brenda Flanagan, NJ Spotlight News.