NEW YORK — At the start of rush hour each evening, commuters bound for the New Jersey suburbs are poised by the track doors at Pennsylvania Station, ready to fly at the first sound of their train and pounce on the first available seat, reports The Times.
Such readiness is not unwarranted. With the World Trade Center PATH station out of commission, seats on the already clogged trains to and from the city have become even more scarce, as longtime commuters are now forced to compete with a host of rerouted passengers.
“I stand about 25 percent of the time,” said Paul Luksa, a West Windsor resident, who was, indeed, seatless last Wednesday night on Amtrak’s Philadelphia-bound 629 train. And the 629, which leaves Penn Station at 5:42 p.m., is an early train, a seated passenger noted. On later NJ Transit trains, he said, ticket takers sometimes don’t even bother to wade through the packed aisles to collect fares.
There is, however, an oasis of calm in the midst of the daily commute from Manhattan. In the car next to Luksa’s, about 80 of the 96 seats were empty that night and riders were stretched out comfortably, sharing snacks, admiring baby pictures and chatting sociably.
As members of the Princeton-based 200 Club, they have paid for this splendid isolation. The club, which leases one Amtrak car each way between Princeton Junction and New York City, is the last private commuter club in the system, an Amtrak spokeswoman in Washington said.
Its members, who also have seats on the Amtrak 628 that leaves Princeton Junction at 7:56 a.m., pay not only for a guaranteed seat but also for an empty seat next to them.
“Our goal is everybody has a seat and generally can take two seats,” said the club’s president, B. Grant Fraser. The club’s 73 members, he said, “want to be able to open up a briefcase and be comfortable.”
The goal, he said, is to have the car “half-occupied.” More than half the members commute regularly, although few ride both ways each day, he said.
“We think we’re full now,” he said. “There are no complaints from the membership that we’re getting too full.”
Luksa and other commuters huddled by the door of the car say the 200 Club car is far too empty and should be opened up to alleviate congestion.
“We’re really subsidizing them,” said another commuter, Celia Lidz.
Fraser defends the club’s use of the car as a legitimate business deal in which member pay a premium for comfort.
He acknowledged that some other commuters on the train “get annoyed when they see it’s almost empty,” but added that they are welcome to apply. Each year, five or six members drop out, he said, and there is “no criteria for joining.” Would-be members, he said, should hand their business cards to the Amtrak conductor stationed outside the car.
In 1993, the club paid Amtrak $2,100 a month to rent the car, but in the mid-1990s, the fee more than doubled. In 1997, full-time members were paying a monthly fee of $75 plus the normal train fare to commute each way. Part-time members who travel less frequently paid a $50 monthly fee.
Fraser would not say if the fees have been raised since then.
Like commuters elsewhere on the train, club members said they were able to use the more economical NJ Transit monthly pass rather than pay the full one-way Amtrak fare between New York and Princeton Junction.
An Amtrak spokeswoman, Karen Dunn, called the lease a reasonable business arrangement that the company inherited from its predecessor, the Pennsylvania Railroad. The club takes its name from that railroad’s 200 series of cars.
“These folks like to be separate commuters,” Dunn said. “They pay us a fee.” She declined to discuss the fee, however, calling it proprietary information.
Michael Bonner, manager of Amtrak’s Clocker service between New York and Philadelphia, said it was difficult to determine whether the company makes or loses money on the lease.
“If you break everything down, it’s hard to say if we are winning or losing financially,” he said, but added that the leased car makes more money than the several coaches Amtrak opens up each day to NJ Transit ticket holders, who pay substantially less for their tickets than Amtrak customers.
The Clocker service in general, he said, “is not a moneymaker.”
Dunn said it is unclear if the 628 and 629 trains would keep the car if Amtrak discontinued its contract with the club.
“If we deemed there was a problem on a regular basis with standees, then a car could be added to that train,” Dunn said, adding that Amtrak had made no such determination. She said she did not have data comparing the number of Clocker service riders before and after Sept. 11 but said Amtrak increased the number of cars briefly after the attack before reverting to earlier levels.
A spokesman for NJ Transit said ridership on New York commutes had risen by more than 10,000 at peak times since Sept. 11, while ridership system-wide had actually declined by 10 percent over the same period. He said the increase was particularly dramatic between Newark, where many commuters used to transfer to the PATH train, and New York City. In January, NJ Transit added cars to its New York City trains, said spokesman Michael Klufas.
Doug Bowen of the New Jersey Association of Railroad Passengers called the 200 Club’s impact on service negligible.
“Eighty seats are not going to solve the standee problem,” he said. “Suddenly Joe Commuter who just moved to the suburbs thinks that some people who stuck with the railroad through thick and thin are supposed to be so magnanimous? Well, they’re paying to get more.”
“Everybody’s angry and upset now, especially after Sept. 11. The squeeze is on.” The answer, he said, is another tunnel into Manhattan.
While current members cannot say exactly when the club was founded, they know it has been around since the mid-1900s, when private commuters cars were far more common and even more luxurious.
William Wright, a director of the passenger association and the group’s historian, recalls that some commuter coaches once trailed dandified cars from the old steam engine trains, with wicker furniture, a bar and an attendant. “They were full of Wall Street big shots,” he said. Those cars were discontinued, however, when the trains were upgraded and members were unwilling to make the investment in modern cars.
Amtrak still leases cars for special excursions — such as this week’s New Jersey Chamber of Commerce trip to Washington, D.C. — and will allow private car owners to hook up to its trains.
But overall, lifestyle changes have reduced demand for private commuter cars. Decades ago, 200 Club members were “typically Wall Street people,” Fraser said. “The stock market dictated when you had to be in and out, and it was a shorter day.”
These days, he said, most club members can’t ride the car both ways. “It now depends on what you do. If you’re a lawyer or in the publishing business, you start late in the morning and work late. If you’re in banking, you start early and can be gone early,” he said.
When he first started commuting to New York in the early 1980s, Fraser said he took the 6:10 train, and the number of people that rode it could “fit in the old Princeton Junction train station, which was the size of a small Cape Cod house. Smokers could stand on one side and nonsmokers on the other, and they never bothered each other.”
But with the explosion of residential construction in the central New Jersey suburbs and the expansion of parking lots at Princeton Junction, the number of area commuters has skyrocketed over the past 20 years.
“With 50 new houses in West Windsor, you’d have another 25 people who wanted to take the train into the city,” Fraser said.
The 200 Club has provided a stress-free alternative to that cramped commute, allowing riders to sit alone and work or to chat in a congenial setting. Many said they had formed friendships that extended beyond the rush-hour commute.
For example, a businesswoman who regularly rides the train said she had sponsored another member’s daughter who was receiving confirmation in the Catholic Church. And, the group holds a Christmas cocktail party aboard the train each year and gets together to celebrate members’ retirements.
“It’s basically a social organization,” Fraser said.
As Amtrak faces serious financial problems, including Friday’s announcement that it would cut $285 million from its budget and possibly suspend some routes, Fraser said 200 Club members do not take their pleasant commute for granted.
“We are always concerned about losing our club,” he said.