In the midst of one of the hottest spells in recent memory, violent storms on Friday, July 3 knocked out service on many of New Jersey Transit’s (NJT’s) rail lines. The service disruptions continued through the holiday and into the following week. The last line to recover completely was the Morris & Essex (M&E) Line, where full service did not return until Wednesday, July 8. In addition to several regional rail lines, the River Line, a non-electrified light rail line between Trenton and Camden, was affected.
Problems with the heat began as early as Tuesday, June 30, when a signal problem at Newark Broad Street Station disrupted service on the M&E and Montclair-Boonton Lines. Thursday again brought disruptions to those lines, and the following weekend was much worse. Colleen Wilson reported in the Bergen Record and other local papers that NJT said that the agency’s difficult week included 545 cancelled trains and 633 delayed trains, of which 733 of those incidents were weather-related and 64 were caused by Amtrak.
The lines that were hardest-hit serve different regions in New Jersey, while other lines located between them suffered only delays or lost service for a brief period of time. The first few days of July were unusually hot, with record-breaking temperatures hovering around, and sometimes exceeding, 100°F; such heat can cause violent thunderstorms under certain conditions. The storms that disrupted New Jersey’s trains hit particularly hard along the western part of the M&E line and on the North Jersey Coast Line (NJCL), which serves the shore. Lines running north of Hoboken—the Main-Bergen, Pascack Valley, and Port Jervis lines—were not affected severely, nor was the Amtrak-owned Northeast Corridor (NEC) line to Trenton. On Friday night, when the storms struck, the only trains running railroad west from New York Penn Station and Secaucus were on the NEC. By Saturday, July 4th, the Raritan line had come back, but not the other lines. The heat wave continued, too.
Rail service on Sunday was unusual. The NJCL was back, so there was access to the shore. Also back was the line between Hoboken and Montclair, even though the M&E and Gladstone Branch (which branches off at Summit) were still out of service. There was also a knockout match for the World Cup tournament, so the special trains taking fans who paid the $98.00 to ride the train to and from the stadium were running, and there was a special boarding area for them at Hoboken. An accommodation for Brazil’s fans at the terminal was a series of station announcements in Portugese.
On weekend match days, NJT ran hourly service on the Montclair-Boonton Line between Hoboken and Bay Street, the first station in Montclair. Service there runs only every 2 hours on weekends, even though advocates at the Lackawanna Coalition, the New Jersey Association of Railroad Passengers (NJ-ARP) and ROUTE (Restore OUr Transit in Essex) continue to push for hourly trains between Hoboken and Montclair State Station with connections at Newark for New York Penn Station and Dover. ROUTE is based in the local area and was formed to advocate for hourly weekend service and restoration of full service on bus routes formerly operated by the DeCamp Bus Company. At the same time, there was no service on the M&E or Gladstone lines. Fans with tickets to the match and the train who live along the Gladstone line or west of Summit on the M&E had no transit access because, despite cross-honoring of NJT tickets, there are no local buses in Morris County on Sundays.
The M&E started to come back on Monday, but on a limited basis only. There were local trains between New York and Summit every 30 minutes, but only during peak-commuting periods. There were no Gladstone trains or any service on the M&E west of Summit. Ironically, all trains stopped at Secaucus that day, in contrast to a normal peak-period schedule, when very few M&E trains stop there.
On Tuesday, the M&E was largely back to its regular weekday schedule, but only from Morristown and points east. All M&E trains to Penn Station originated in Morristown, no rail service was provided to Morris Plains or Mount Tabor, and Denville and Dover had only limited service. Diesel trains scheduled to run on the M&E to and from Denville and points west were detoured onto the Boonton Line and ran express over that line between Denville and Broad Street Station in Newark. This essentially meant that Denville and Dover had almost no rail service, except during rush hours.
NJT employees were generally given high marks for their performance under difficult circumstances not of their making. President and CEO Kris Kolluri praised repair crews on Monday for their efforts to get service going again. Wilson reported that he said, “That is a good example of the NJ Transit crews understanding how important it is to make sure we deliver on a weekday as best a service as we can, but that doesn’t mean I don’t appreciate or understand, more importantly, their frustrations.” It would be 2 days before full service on the M&E would be restored. Wilson reported that 70-mph winds blew down more than 50 trees on that line, taking power wires for the trains down with them.
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