(The Associated Press circulated the following article by Geoff Mulvhill on March 15.)
ABOARD THE RIVER LINE — Frank C. Kozempel could not be aboard when the last passenger train chugged along the Camden-Amboy line back in June 1963, but he wasn’t about to miss it when a new rail line opened Sunday, carrying passengers along part of the same route.
“I’m delighted to see this finally come to pass,” said Kozempel, 74, a Cinnaminson resident and railroad historian who has served as president of a branch of the National Railroad Historical Society.
Like many of the train buffs – almost all of them men, some with groggy children in tow – who hopped on the River Line before dawn Sunday to say they were among the first to ride the new light rail, Kozempel had a camera dangling around his neck. Unlike most riders, he could recite the history of every rail tower that lay along its route.
In the new Camden-to-Trenton light-rail line’s past is about a decade’s worth of political contention over the $1.1 billion cost and construction delays.
Ahead of it are the answers to questions about whether a new commuter rail line slicing through an area that’s losing population can find enough riders to justify its cost and help boost the towns along its way.
But Sunday, the River Line’s doubters – and there are plenty of them – stayed home.
The complaints weren’t about the existence of the line, for once, but were instead picayune.
Laurence Stom, 46, a probation officer who lives in Pine Hill, for example, was disappointed that New Jersey Transit officials weren’t handing out any sort of souvenirs for the River Line’s first paying customers.
To commemorate the day, riders simply got train tickets. And not all had them. The tickets work on the honor system – and in the celebratory mood of the first trains – no one seemed to care whether passengers paid for the $1.10 one-way tickets or not.
Warren Stanley, 48, had no complaints.
The early hour and the smooth ride on a line with welded rails, and none of that familiar “chugga-chugga,” helped Stanley become perhaps the first River Line napper.
Stanley, a Philadelphia resident who drives school buses for a private school, is a mass-transit rail aficionado. About twice a month, he said, he trains up to New York City just to ride subways for the day.
With the River Line in the mix now, he expects it will be a big part of his transit days.
“It’s a wonderful ride,” he said.
The first train left Camden promptly at 5:45 a.m. Sunday. It already had nearly a car-full of passengers who got on at a Pennsauken station, near where the trains are kept overnight.
The passengers it carried didn’t have destinations – just curiosity about the trains, which they rode up to Trenton and back.
Brandon Harris, a 16-year-old Camden resident whose father and two older brothers are bus drivers, said he doesn’t tend to go to places the River Line goes and is unlikely to ride it much.
“I’m just riding it once, just to see how it is,” he said.
For Kozempel, who has been a train buff since he was a seventh-grader in Maple Shade in 1941, watching trains full of Army troops heading to Fort Dix, the inaugural scheduled run of the River Line was especially meaningful.
He has been on the last trip for several trains as they shut down over his lifetime. But Sunday’s journey was the first time he had been among the first on a train.