Saturday, June 7 was a cloudy day with rain showers; appropriate weather for the last day of service at a station that had served its community for 154½ years. Trains on NJ Transit’s “Main Line” stopped at Kingsland for the last time, as service ended early Sunday morning; the end of Saturday’s service day.
The closure was ordered in light of the opening of a rebuilt station at Lyndhurst, roughly ¾ of a mile and about a 15-minute walk from Kingsland and with no buses running between the two locations. The Kingsland station was located on Ridge Road, a principal street in the community. The station building, a brick edifice built in 1918, led to two long stairways down to side platforms that served the trains going to and from such places as Paterson, Ridgewood, and Suffern, New York.
NJ Transit’s current “Main Line” was pieced together from parts of the Erie and Lackawanna Railroads in the early 1960s, after the two had merged to form the Erie-Lackawanna. Kingsland, along with other stations as far from Hoboken as Clifton, were originally part of the Lackawanna Railroad’s Boonton Line, as are current stations from Mountain View west to Denville, which operate only during peak-commuting periods. Passenger service at Kingsland began on December 14, 1870.
Whatever justifications the railroad cited for eliminating the Kingsland Station, lack of ridership is not one of them. For the first quarter of 2025, NJ Transit reported an average of 311 weekday riders; more than six other stations on the line, especially stations north (railroad west) of Ridgewood, and 67 other stations systemwide.
One loss to the community, especially to people who depend on transit, will be the lack of connectivity with Newark’s Penn Station and Broad Street Station, and also the Bergen County Line at Rutherford, along with the Pascack Valley Line at Essex Street in Hackensack. The #76 bus, which runs a full span of service, still runs between Newark and Hackensack and stops at the Kingsland station’s location but, without trains, riders will no longer be able to transfer between the train and the bus. The Lackawanna Coalition attempted to convince NJ Transit and Lyndhurst town officials to keep Kingsland open, but to no avail.
NJ Transit had told the remaining riders that, without the stop at Kingland, their trip would be two minutes shorter. The Coalition called on the agency to place that time saving in the new schedules. A review of the old and new schedules revealed that, while a few peak-commuting trains showed longer times between Secaucus Junction Station and Lyndhurst, most inbound trains were scheduled to take ten minutes inbound and eight minutes outbound with the Kingsland stop. The new schedules call for inbound trains to take eight minutes without the Kingland stop (again, with a few peak-commuting exceptions). Outbound trains on weekends and at low-ridership times on weekdays are scheduled to take six minutes, although most outbound trains are scheduled to take seven minutes; one minute less than under the old schedule, rather than two. So, NJ Transit has reduced travel time; sometimes by the amount the agency mentioned, and sometimes not. On the whole, the loss of Kingsland Station also represents a loss of mobility for riders in the community.
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