While transit in New York City and the railroads that serve its suburbs on the New York side of the Hudson River seem to be out of the woods for the next few years, the same cannot be said about New Jersey. New Jersey Transit (NJT), the state’s multi-modal transit agency, is facing the fiscal cliff, too. The agency is…

Times look bleak for many transit providers at this writing. Reports both for the trade and in popular media have spread the word that transit is in trouble. The federal operating support for transit that Congress authorized at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic will soon run out. Many transit providers are scrambling to raise the money to keep going…

Running a railroad is a complex endeavor. So is running urban rail transit, such as metropolitan-style rail lines (like the New York subways), urban light rail, and modern-style or heritage-style streetcars. While almost all the major transit providers also operate bus networks of comparable magnitude, railroads and rail transit are more complex and expensive. The agencies that run them must…

All is not well in the world of transit in the United States today. The COVID-19 virus has changed the way many Americans work, among other large-scale social and economic changes, and they include the way riders use rail transit. Carrying commuters into the city core in the morning and back home at the end of the workday was the…

Last summer I finished riding the entire VIA Rail system, including the railroad’s remote “Adventure” routes. It was not easy, and I reported those trips in a series collectively titled Adventures on VIA Rail. This is another trip report about VIA Rail, but it reflects a travel experience totally different from the adventures I had last summer. It was a…

When Amtrak began operations in 1971, two-thirds of the long-distance and corridor-length trains that had previously run in the United States were discontinued. Amtrak’s original long-distance network consisted of only 14 routes. A few were added and taken away again during the 1970s, and there have been other changes since then, but the network today also numbers 14 routes, and…

Until September 2023, Brightline, Florida’s private-sector passenger railroad, had only operated between Miami and West Palm Beach. Then, on Sept. 22, the railroad extended service to a new station at Orlando International Airport (MCO). That extension is now affecting fares on the original part of the railroad, as most commutation-style fares within South Florida will end soon. In effect, Brightline…

Amtrak’s skeletal network of long-distance (L-D) passenger trains is the same size now as it was in 1971, when “America’s Railroad” was founded—14 routes. Advocates around the nation are pushing for that network to grow. They hope that, at long last, there will be more L-D passenger trains on the rails than at any time prior to 1979, when Amtrak…

Sound Transit, the regional agency in the Seattle area, has been expanding lately. Its most recent light rail expansion, the 2 Line, opened on Saturday, April 27. The new line connects Bellevue and Redmond, but it does not connect to the 1, the rail spine that goes through Seattle on a north-south alignment, at least not yet. Still, the opening…

We are still waiting for Judge Leo M. Gordon to decide the case filed by the State of New Jersey and other plaintiffs who oppose the Congestion Pricing proposal, which would impose tolls on motor vehicles that enter Manhattan at 60th Street and further south. He is expected to issue a ruling in June. Other cases in federal courts on…

The MTA on April 26 announced that Central Business District Tolling, which the agency calls “the country’s first congestion pricing program,” will begin in Manhattan ‘s designated Congestion Relief Zone early on Sunday, June 30, at 12:00:01 a.m. (details below). Is the MTA jumping the gun, or is at the very least over-confident? When we most recently reported to you…

There is plenty of action on the passenger rail scene in Florida these days. Brightline started service on its northward and westward expansion to Orlando Airport on Sept. 22, 2023, and more trains have been added to the schedule since then. At the other end of Brightline, that railroad’s Miami Central station is now hosting trains on Tri-Rail, presently as…

It seems that there were only two topics on everybody’s mind lately: the election and the eclipse that would occur on Monday, April 8. The latter would be the first solar eclipse visible in the United States since 2017, and the last until 2044. The band of totality moved across much of the nation, encompassing several major cities. One place…

On Sept. 22, 2023, Brightline ran its first train from the railroad’s new station at Orlando International Airport (coded MCO) to its Miami Central Station. That run was accompanied by a capacity crowd on the airport station’s platform and a great deal of fanfare, as the nation’s only private-sector passenger railroad running scheduled service every day extended its operation from…

At this writing, there are court cases about congestion pricing pending in federal courts on both sides of the Hudson River, or as longtime New Jersey advocate Albert L. Papp calls it: the “Hudson Ocean.” If Papp’s characterization were ever accurate, it is now. Federal highway officials have issued a Finding of No Significant Impact (FONSI) and an Environmental Assessment…

As we wait for Judge Leo Gordon to decide the case filed by the State of New Jersey in federal court in that state, and as we also wait for a group of cases filed in the Southern District of New York to proceed, New York’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) has been moving forward in its own way: preparing for…

In parts 4, 5 and 6 of this series, we examined a “border dispute” between New Jersey and New York. Gov. Phil Murphy of the Garden State initiated an action in federal court for the District of New Jersey against federal highway officials, seeking to invalidate the Finding of No Significant Impact (FONSI) and the Environmental Assessment (EA) that had…

RAILWAY AGE APRIL 2024 ISSUE: “Long COVID” for America’s regional/commuter railroads is restricting post-pandemic progress speed.

A lot happened last year in the court case concerning the proposal for congestion pricing, charging a toll for vehicles entering the Central Business District of Manhattan, defined as the area south of 60th Street, but excluding the highways along the perimeter of that part of the island. The action to invalidate and set aside the Environmental Assessment (EA) and…

It has been more than four decades since a scheduled passenger train called at any point in the Lehigh Valley, in northeastern Pennsylvania. At one time the area hosted service to New York and nearby New Jersey, to Philadelphia, and to other places in Pennsylvania, including Reading and Harrisburg. The service to the New York area ended in 1967, to…