(The following article by Robert Stern was posted on the Trenton Times website on April 12.)
TRENTON, N.J. — Next stop, Philadelphia?
That’s what NJ Transit officials are looking to arrange in a bid to loop some of their trains from northern and central New Jersey to Atlantic City and back on existing rail lines through the City of Brotherly Love.
“The objective here is to connect central New Jersey to both 30th Street (Station in Philadelphia) and Atlantic City,” NJ Transit Executive Director George Warrington said yesterday.
The plan for direct NJ Transit rail service between Newark’s Penn Station or Hoboken and Atlantic City via Philadelphia would include stops at Princeton Junction, Hamilton and Trenton, Warrington said.
Details remain uncertain, and the entire proposal hinges on NJ Transit successfully negotiating a deal with Amtrak for use of its Northeast Corridor tracks between Trenton and Philadelphia, which are in Pennsylvania and currently off-limits to NJ Transit trains.
NJ Transit, which has had internal discussions for a Trenton-to-Philadelphia-to-Atlantic City direct rail route for about a year, already has begun negotiating with Amtrak for access to its tracks between Philadelphia and Trenton, Warrington said.
“We have a business negotiation that’s ongoing with Amtrak,” he said, though the talks haven’t been intense.
He said NJ Transit recognizes Amtrak will want assurances that allowing NJ Transit trains to operate from Philadelphia to Trenton won’t cost Amtrak, perhaps by taking away too many Amtrak passengers.
“I’m confident that we’ll be able to work through (any) issues,” Warrington said. “We need to agree on what the market . . . and the pricing structure would be.”
Even so, NJ Transit hopes to offer commuters both less-costly express train service between Trenton and Philadelphia than Amtrak provides and more rapid rail commutes between those two cities than are available on SEPTA trains, which make many local stops, he said.
An Amtrak spokesman was not immediately available for comment after office hours yesterday.
Warrington said he would like to have a deal worked out with Amtrak over the next six to eight months, though he expects it will take 18 to 24 months for NJ Transit to have the equipment capacity to serve the Trenton-Philadelphia-Atlantic City route.
“This service has very real prospects, which I and we (at NJ Transit) are very interested in advancing,” Warrington said. “From a timing point of view, we have to work through our equipment issues first.
“Today, we don’t have the flexibility in our equipment pool to offer this service,” he said.
But that will change as NJ Transit puts into service, over the next 18 months or so, many of the 231 multilevel passenger train cars it began ordering in 2002 to increase passenger capacity and the number of seats available on its crowded trains, especially those providing service to and from New York City.
Warrington said it’s premature to speculate on the cost or fares for rail service between Atlantic City and Philadelphia and the central and northern parts of New Jersey.
Besides stops in Trenton, Hamilton and Princeton Junction, other stops envisioned for the extended Atlantic City rail service are New Brunswick, Metro Park, Newark and maybe Hoboken.
NJ Transit, which already operates its own rail line between Philadelphia and Atlantic City, would extend the routes of many of its trains on that line north to Trenton.
Warrington said the expanded Atlantic City rail service would stop short of New York City because the Atlantic City-to-Philadelphia trains are powered by diesel locomotives, which can’t operate through the Hudson River rail tunnels between New Jersey and Manhattan.
NJ Transit’s Northeast Corridor trains that operate to New York are electrically powered.
NJ Transit operates 14 daily train trips between Atlantic City and Philadelphia, 11 of which it is considering extending over the Northeast Corridor line, said spokeswoman Penny Bassett Hackett.
Assemblyman Bill Baroni, R-Hamilton, who participated in a transportation conference in Atlantic City where the rail plan was described, welcomed the idea of using existing rail lines to provide NJ Transit train passengers transfer-free access to Philadelphia and Atlantic City.
“It’s a great step in the right direction,” Baroni said.