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Re: (erielack) NJ Trip
- --- On Thu, 7/28/11, Ed Montgomery <etmontgomery46_@_gmail.com> wrote:
> I always find it interesting riding past the NJT shops in
> Kearny. I say the NYC observation car "Hickory Creek" and
> a stainless steel NYC car parked there. I believe the "Hickory
> Creek" was one of the cars once used on the "20th Century Limited".
It was. It belongs to URHS and was painstakingly restored a few years ago.
> Good to see it still around, still in NYC gray.
Agree!
> Does NJT provide shop service for the owners of these cars?
No, it was probably going to or from a trip. It would have to go through the NJT shop area for Amtrak to pick it up to go to Sunnyside and get on its train.
> Between what was once Ampere and Roseville Avenue, the
> catenary supports seemed to have been designed for a third
> electrified track. Does anybody have any information
> on that?
It went into a Westinghouse factory that was the reason for Ampere station existing; workers took the Lackawanna there (just like they rode to Harrison to work at RCA, making vacuum tubes).
> I realize that NJ is in a budget crunch, and looking at the
> Montclair/Boonton Line timetable, the reduction of trains
> west of Montclair state is almost where train service was
> in the 70s.
Yes, no off-peak service between MSU and Denville. I rode some of the off-peak trains; average ridership was about 10 per trip.
> One thing that really boggled my mind was the weekend service.
> Why is it terminated at Bay Street? One would think the majority
> of passengers would be between there and Montclair State. The
> Bay Street termination almost insures low ridership.
All Montclair weekend service uses one train set that previously operated as the Hoboken-Newark shuttle after NJ Transit cut weekend Gladstone branch service back to Summit.
The shuttle operated every other hour, except late at night when there's a three-hour gap. The westbound shuttle reached Newark first, then deadheaded west, crossed to the center track at GREEN and laid over east of East Orange for nearly an hour. After the next eastbound passed, it crossed to the eastbound track and followed it to Newark. The schedule did not quite allow for hourly service using one train set.
Advocates urged NJT to do something useful with this train. It was finally determined that it could go to Bay Street, Montclair, and have enough time to turn around and get back to Newark in time to connect with the trains to and from New York. This required a major change in the way the NJT operates at Newark when there is a connection.
The Montclair train from Hoboken reaches Newark four minutes ahead of the Dover train from New York, stopping on track 3 (westbound local). The train from New York arrives on track 1 (center), passengers transfer, and the Dover train leaves first, with the Montclair train three minutes later. This is the easy part.
Eastbound is another story. The Montclair train has to cross from track 2 to track 1 on the branch, west of Roseville, so it can arrive at Newark on track 3 (same as westbound). The Dover train crosses to track 1 at GREEN and arrives a few minutes later. It goes first, crossing back to track 2 just east of the Passaic River Bridge. The Montclair train has to cross the bridge on the westbound track, then it crosses to the center track at Harrison on its way to Hoboken. The train paths cross east of Newark in both directions, so they can't run at the same time there.
The layover at Bay Street is 19 minutes. Going to MSU takes 16 minutes each way, and there are no useful crossovers, just a center siding that is not electrified. If the train went beyond Bay Street, it would not get back to Newark in time to make its next connection.
It has nothing to do with whether people farther west in Montclair, or Little Falls (MSU station is in that township) want trains or not, but is just an operational reality.
The advocates are glad that they were able to get something useful out of this train; the crews aren't - under the old plan, they actually worked about 40 minutes of each two hour cycle!
Gary R. Kazin
DL&W Milepost R35.7
Rockaway, New Jersey
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