It was a day nobody alive at the time will ever forget. Both buildings of the World Trade Center were attacked and brought down, using airplanes loaded with fuel as weapons. In a sense, the Lower Manhattan Financial District never recovered, and much of the business activity that once took place there moved to Midtown or New Jersey. Lackawanna Coalition member Al Anton wrote a short essay for the Railgram about his experience escaping from one of the Twin Towers headlined A Day Like No Other. He recalled seeing firefighters walking up the stairs, probably to their deaths, while everybody else was walking down to escape.
Firefighters, police, EMT technicians, and other first responders made heroic efforts to rescue survivors as the rest of the city and world looked on. Railroaders, transit workers, and other transportation workers were heroes, too. Much of Lower Manhattan’s transit infrastructure in was destroyed, and the people who operated what was left concentrated on getting as many survivors as possible out of the area and heading toward home. It seemed that every boat on the Hudson River joined in the effort. City subway lines operated as best they could after a brief morning systemwide suspension, as managers assessed the situation. To get more people out, NJ Transit trains and the local New York railroads ran outbound as often as possible, while deadheading train sets inbound to pick up another load of people for another outbound run.
NJ Transit, Metro-North, and the Long Island Rail Road recovered quickly, since railroad infrastructure was not destroyed. The same could not be said for PATH or the NYC system. For almost 2 years, PATH trains bypassed the area. For the only time in its history, PATH ran direct service between Newark Penn Station and its “uptown” terminal at 33rd Street and Sixth Avenue. It took 9 revisions of the New York City Subway service patterns to get back to “normal” operation for the time, as service slowly came back to Lower Manhattan. The Cortlandt Street station on the #1 train was so badly damaged that it did not return to service until 2018.
NJ Transit published an account of the day’s events on its 20th anniversary in 2021. It can be found on the agency’s website at https://www.njtransit.com/first-run/20-years-later. It includes memories from both Kevin S. Corbett, executive director at the time, and employees who were on the scene. Many other agency employees were credited with helping the evacuation and recovery efforts, also.
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