Idyll in Jersey (Avenue, Main)

Last Thursday Lynn and I had a leisurely lunch with an old friend at the Sakura Japanese buffet in North Brunswick.  It was a beautiful day with cloudless blue skies, and since the NJT Jersey Avenue station is only a 10 minute trip, we decided to check it out.
 
Jersey Avenue is, basically, an enormous park-and-ride facility; it attracts riders from a wide area, since the next stop west is Princeton Junction, a whopping 14 miles away.  In the days when the area was nothing but farms, PRR had at least three intermediate stops; now, it’s wall-to-wall condos, but no stations.  NJT wants to build a new one, but even advocates can’t agree that it would be a wise investment.
 
Since we’d have to park the car, we had to watch out for parking cops looking to see if we’d paid, but none appeared. I hadn’t been to Jersey Avenue in a long time, and was unfamiliar with the layout.  We drove through the large lot, looking for spaces; then something appeared I had forgotten about, a railroad grade crossing—which leads to a separate parking lot immediately adjacent to the Trenton-bound platform (“Jersey Avenue Main”) on the outbound NEC main line. The somewhat decrepit single track we crossed is the famous, or infamous, Delco Lead, a track used for switching industrial freight customers; it begins at this point and extends for miles. NJT plans to convert it into a refuge for NEC equipment in case Superstorm Sandy returns and floods the Meadows Maintenance Facility again.  They also plan a loop to turn trains without fouling the NEC, and an inspection facility; all of  this is controversial in the advocate community—some think they have better uses for the money, or maybe they’re just protecting the interests of taxpayers in Iowa.

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A Trip to the Symphony: State Theatre

Today, March 13th, I had a ticket for a 3:00 p.m. performance by the New Jersey Symphony at the State Theatre in New Brunswick, and I decided to go by train. I drove to the New Bridge Landing station, where I boarded Pascack Valley Line Train #2112, which departed at 12:45 p.m. and arrived at Secaucus at 1:12 p.m., giving me plenty of time to transfer to Northeast Corridor Train #7845, scheduled to depart at 1:23 p.m. The train operated a few minutes late, and we arrived at the New Brunswick station at 2:17 p.m., six minutes late. That was fine, as it takes about 10 minutes to walk to the State Theater, which didn’t open to the public until 2:30 p.m.

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New Brunswick Storage Yard Advances

NJ Transit, in efforts to avoid equipment damage such as occurred with Hurricane Sandy, on January 8th approved engineering contracts for its plan to build and expand storage yards in the New Brunswick area, according to reporting by Mike Frassinelli in the Star-Ledger (January 9).  The Sandy disaster unfolded after NJT stored equipment in yards in Hoboken and the Jersey Meadows that proved vulnerable to storm-surge flooding; hundreds of cars and locomotives were damaged, and some have still not been repaired more than a year later.  The railroad had already activated plans to make safer storage locations available in Linden and Garwood.  The $7.64-million design and engineering contract will be for the County Yard, at the Jersey Avenue station south of New Brunswick, and the adjacent Mile Run Yard, not presently in service.  A recent report on the Sandy disaster, commissioned by NJT from the Texas A&M Engineering and Extension Service, concluded that NJT needed better flood protection models to predict storm impact.  Critics have said that NJT ignored reports that forecast the flooding that took place, relying instead on overly optimistic forecasts.  Phil Craig of the NJ Association of Railroad Passengers called the Texas A&M report “a whitewash, pure and simple.”