(Bloomberg News circulated the following article on October 21.)
NEW YORK — Amtrak’s decision to halt some express train service between New York and Philadelphia next week ends an exclusive, more than 50-year arrangement that let commuters in the “200 Club” pay extra to ride in a private car.
The club, named after train number 200 to New York, has about 75 members from New Jersey’s Princeton Junction station who pay a premium over the $301 monthly ticket for a reserved seat and less-hectic commute. The group leases a private car attached to Amtrak’s “Clocker” trains from Philadelphia in the morning and Manhattan during the evening rush hour.
New Jersey Transit will replace the “Clocker” service, which features large individual seats and a faster ride, with its own express trains that will also bypass all the stations between Princeton and Newark, New Jersey. Club members, including tight-lipped lawyers who do deals in New York, will join the 50,000 daily commuters on New Jersey Transit’s Northeast Corridor line competing for the school bus-like seating.
“We have tried to find a solution that would allow us to continue in some way shape or form, both with Amtrak and with New Jersey Transit,” said B. Grant Fraser of Kingston, New Jersey, the club’s president since the late 1980s. “It doesn’t look like we’re going to be able to do anything.”
The club, a throwback to the Jazz Age that Princeton University alumnus F. Scott Fitzgerald would have appreciated, predates the formation of Amtrak in 1971. It was established by commuters who leased a car from the old Pennsylvania Railroad.
Fraser, 55, and other members declined to comment on the fee. The New York Times said in a May 2002 article that a full- time membership cost $1,200 a year.
Privileged Class
At one time, the private car featured extras such as porters to serve drinks. That was discontinued after Amtrak, the federally funded U.S. passenger railroad, took over the line and banned services from being offered in private cars that aren’t available to regular passengers.
“It’s just a comfortable space that people use to work or relax quietly,” said Dave Ross, 62, a lawyer from Princeton who has been a member for at least six years.
Other New Jersey Transit commuters who ride the Clocker trains, which honor monthly and weekly tickets, take notice of the privileged group, which includes a mix of mostly middle-aged bankers, lawyers and businesspeople.
“The first time you take the Clocker, you learn about the private car, because there were always seats on that train and people gravitate back there,” said Tom Cooper, 49, chief operating officer of New York-based advertising firm Cooper Direct, who has commuted from Princeton Junction for 10 years. “You learn the lesson pretty quick because you get thrown out of the car.”
Crowded Trains
The percentage of Clocker passengers who are New Jersey Transit riders has risen over the years as Amtrak reduced the number of the trains, which got their nickname because they used to run every hour, said New Jersey Transit spokesman Dan Stessel. About 85 percent of the 1.9 million passengers who rode the trains in 2004 were New Jersey commuters.
New Jersey Transit will save about $6 million a year by taking its riders off the Amtrak trains, Stessel said. The agency has ordered 231 two-level train cars to add about 20 percent in seating capacity and help alleviate congestion.
“I knew about it for a long time and was never smart enough to join until a few years ago,” said Harlan Greenman, 45, a lawyer who has been commuting to New York since moving to Princeton Junction about 19 years ago.
The New Jersey agency is the fourth-largest U.S. commuter- rail operation with about 64.6 million riders a year in 2003, the last year for which statistics are available, said Virginia Miller, a spokeswoman for the American Public Transportation Association. The Long Island Rail Road is the nation’s largest.
Regular Guys
“These are run by state agencies, and they don’t want to be bothered,” said Paul Kutta, a member of the Philadelphia- based National Railway Historical Society and an associate editor of the organization’s newsletter. “You can’t have someone of a higher station riding on your trains.”
Members who ride on the private car in the morning aren’t necessarily the same people who ride the trains at night, Fraser said. The club holds an annual holiday party on the car and also holds an event for members and spouses in the Princeton area. One notable visitor was comedian Bill Cosby, who members allowed to ride in the car when he traveled to Princeton to perform at McCarter Theater in the 1990s.
“It is not the Fortune 500 chairmen’s club,” Fraser said. “It’s just a friendly group of diverse individuals with varying degrees of gender and economic status that just feel that having that seat is a nice way to kind of smooth over what is a difficult exercise getting back and forth out of New York.”
Fraser, who worked as a reinsurance broker in Manhattan for more than 20 years, joined the club in the early 1980s after moving to the Princeton region and hearing about it from his father-in-law. He still manages the group’s finances, although he stopped commuting to New York.
“It’s too bad,” Ross said of the demise of the club, but “we’ll have a party and celebrate the end of a good thing.”