MONTCLAIR, N.J. — New equipment is on the way to boost improvements of NJ Transit’s rail service, part of an ongoing process that the agency’s President and CEO, Kevin Corbett, likened to “turning around a battleship.”
Corbett spoke at a Monday event which included Gov. Phil Murphy signed an order requiring the agency to offer monthly reports on its performance, [see “NJ Transit to begin reports on delays, cancellations,” Trains News Wire, Aug. 20, 2019.]
The head of the nation’s largest statewide transit system noted that year-to-date train cancellations were down 28% over 2018, and new hires now constitute 14% of the 12,000 employees, insuring proper staffing levels for operations. A comprehensive five-year plan for capital expenditures, which NJ Transit has not had previously, will be put in place by April 2020.
The agency has been conducting positive train control testing with Amtrak on the Northeast corridor for eight months, Corbett said, with revenue testing this year. Interoperability with Conrail, Norfolk Southern, Metro-North, and Amtrak, a key component of PTC, will also be tested. And a revised financial plan will be submitted next month for the Portal North Bridge, the project to replace the aging span near Secaucus, to satisfy FTA requirements for the shovel-ready project.
On the equipment front, 17 new Bombardier ALP-45DPs, are due next year; the dual-power locomotives will replace the oldest locomotives in the fleet. Some of those, still in daily operation, date to the mid-1960s. And 113 Bombardier bilevel electric MU cars, with rider-preferred two-by-two seating, are due in 2023. They will replace the Arrow IIIs, some of which date to the Carter Administration. Corbett said that the mean distance between equipment failures, a measure of unexpected breakdowns, is once every 40,000 miles. With newer equipment, it is once every 400,000 miles.
Corbett also said that single-seat off-peak service on the Raritan Valley Line should resume sometime after Labor Day. It was suspended in September 2018, along with service on NJT’s isolated Atlantic City line and the “Princeton Dinky” shuttle service, as the agency installed PTC equipment and addressed its ongoing shortage of engineers. Another class of engineers will graduate this fall, and by the end of 2020, six classes will have graduated, minimizing the number of trains cancelled because of a lack of crews.
