Frustrated and angry commuters broke through a door at the Amtrak train station Wednesday to get to the platform after they found a dark, locked station upon arriving before 5:30 a.m.

Because of what Amtrak called a "scheduling error," no one had arrived to open the McGovern Avenue station.

"Everybody was mad because they were afraid they were going to miss the train," said Todd Reinhart, a Lancaster resident who was headed to a business meeting in New York.

Around 5:15 a.m., a growing crowd of commuters started banging on the front doors and windows of the station when they discovered it was locked.

"They were packed down the sidewalk," said Chad Burkhart, who works in the station's parking lot. "People were upset."

The commuters signaled construction workers who were inside the station. The workers did not have keys to the front doors but they let the commuters in through a side entrance.

Once the commuters, numbering between 75 and 100, made their way upstairs to the darkened station, they found another roadblock.

The door leading from the station down to the train platform was locked, too, commuters said.

"People were saying, 'We're not going to get down to the train,' " said Tom Roche, a East Petersburg resident heading to his job at General Electric in Wayne.

Someone — commuters aren't sure who it was — found a way to dash across the train tracks and get up on the platform. That person then ran up the flight of stairs to see if the door could be unlocked from the platform side, said Civia Katz, a Manheim Township resident headed to her job in Philadelphia.

But it was padlocked with a metal bar.

There was a brief discussion of finding a screwdriver to unfasten the bar, Katz said.

Then someone began pushing against the door and the metal bar. Others helped.

"They put enough pressure on it — it wasn't heavy — then the bar got snapped off," she said. "Everybody started pouring down to the platform."

People were hopping mad, Katz said.

"This is a major corridor. You have a ton of people going to work," she said. "There are attorneys heading to court. This train goes to New York.

"Amtrak is running this like a Ma and Pa operation. They do nothing to increase the comfort of the person taking the train. They lock us out of the building. They are operating it like a general store in the 1800s."

Reinhart jokingly tweeted his frustration, posting this on Twitter:

"Parking = $5. Train tix 2 NYC = $45. Arrive @ the Lancaster Amtrak Station 10 minutes b4 departure 2 find it still locked up = priceless!"

Alexander Kohl, a construction worker at the station, said people were going in the side door when he arrived early Wednesday.

"It was more like panic, to make sure they were going to get their train," he said.

Kohl heard an Amtrak worker had called in sick, and that is why the station was not properly opened.

Amtrak's official position is that the lockout was because of a "scheduling error."

Spokeswoman Danelle Hunter said she could not confirm if someone had called in sick because she did not have "that level of detail."

"It caused a small delay in opening the station," she said. "The good news is that they were able to get the station open and get passengers to their trains on time."

It's not the first time commuters arrived to find early morning problems, they said.

Roche said commuters also were briefly locked out of the station several years ago when someone did not arrive on time.

Commuter Mike Tafelski, a Manheim Township resident who takes the train to Philadelphia, said commuters also found the door to the platform steps locked not too long ago.

People had to crowd onto an elevator to get down to the tracks.

Those elevators were not working Wednesday, said Katz, a former correspondent for Lancaster Newspapers Inc.

"I think the public is angry," she said. "Institutions are failing us. Our government is failing us. It's like that attitude with Occupy Wall Street. The job isn't getting done.

"You have no choice as the public except to take things into your own hands.

"Really, who are you going to depend on? Nobody is serving the public anymore."

The Lancaster Amtrak station has been a source of ire in recent years.

The station is used by more than 500,000 passengers a year and is the second busiest station, behind Philadelphia, on the Keystone line.

An ongoing $14.2 million renovation project at the station has been plagued by numerous delays.

Then public officials recently learned the project would not include work on the station's crumbling interior.

"It's a sad commentary about everything that is going on with Amtrak," Roche said of Wednesday's incident. "There's a lot of improvement that needs to be done."

cstauffer@lnpnews.com