(The following story by Tom Feeney appeared on the Star-Ledger website on April 29.)
NEWARK, N.J. — Weekend service will be expanded on the Northeast Corridor and reduced on the Morris & Essex Lines when NJ Transit adjusts its rail schedules later this month.
Four eastbound and five westbound trains will be added on the weekends on the busy Northeast Corridor between Rahway and Penn Station New York, spokeswoman Penny Bassett Hackett said. The new trains are expected to reduce crowding on other local Northeast Corridor and North Jersey Coast Line trains.
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On the Morris & Essex Lines, trains will run about once an hour on the weekends between Summit and Hoboken when the new schedule goes into effect May 11. Trains now run twice an hour during parts of the weekend on that line.
Riders farther west on the M&E — between Dover and Summit — will see trains at roughly the same intervals they do now, but they will have to transfer at Summit or the Newark-Broad Street Station if they want to go to Hoboken. M&E riders will see similar reductions in service during off-peak times Monday through Friday.
“We work very hard to maintain efficiency by serving the greatest number of riders possible with the available resources,” Hackett said. “From time to time, that means redeploying crews and equipment to meet demand rather than increasing our costs.”
The reduced weekend and off-peak service on the M&E has angered the leadership of the Lackawanna Coalition, a nearly 30-year-old group that advocates for better service on the M&E and Montclair-Boonton Lines.
“To eliminate this much service without any sort of public notice — it’s unconscionable,” said David Peter Allen, the group’s president.
The coalition has circulated fliers to let riders know about the changes, and Allen has written to state legislators whose districts are traversed by the M&E seeking their help in restoring the cuts. In his letter to the legislators, he calls the cuts “a severe blow to mobility in our communities.”
But NJ Transit Executive Director Richard Sarles described weekend and off-peak ridership on the M&E as “anemic” when he addressed the board of NJ Transit on the subject earlier this month.
Hackett said the three- and four-car trains that run on the M&E off-peak average between 100 and 200 passengers, meaning they are sometimes up to three-quarters empty while trains elsewhere on the NJ Transit system are bursting at the seams.
The demand for trains that travel into Midtown Manhattan far exceeds demand for trains that travel to Hoboken, she said. Ridership on trains into Midtown has increased 40 percent since September 2001. Ridership on trains into Hoboken, like the M&E, has declined by 30 percent in the same period.
The changes in the new timetables are not all bad for M&E riders: The schedule adds a peak-period train that will serve the two busiest stations on the line — Maplewood and South Orange.