What does the history of rail service in New Jersey tell us about its ongoing dysfunction?

A new book on the northeast corridor by SUNY Buffalo professor David Alff shows that few of the problems that NJ Transit is facing now are new. (Photo by Edwin J. Torres/NJ Governor’s Office)

Despite decades of promises and the efforts of governors of both parties, NJ Transit still isn’t working.

This past summer saw days of mass cancellations and delays due to drooping power lines. The last time the service met its own goal of 94.7% on time was more than six months ago (and that’s even with their rather flexible definition of what “on time” means). As anyone who’s traveled to the European Union, Japan, or China can attest, rail service in other countries is generally faster, cheaper, and more reliable than it is here. The question is why, and what can be done about it.

Some of the answers come from the history of rail service in New Jersey, as presented in “The Northeast Corridor: The Trains, the People, the History, the Region,” by David Alff. Alff — an English professor at SUNY Buffalo — has put together a history of northeast corridor train service and shows that few of the problems that we’re facing now are new, and almost all of them are rooted in a confluence of cut corners and short-sighted, strategy-free decision making.

Alff’s historical work documents the extent to which current problems are nothing new. During the Civil War, riders complained that Camden & Amboy train cars in New Jersey were “crammed to suffocation” and “prone to delay.” One lawmaker accused the line of fraud “almost as pernicious” as that of the Confederacy. Still, it’s a little upsetting to read about John Quincy Adams measuring the speed of a train outside of New York City that’s faster than some NJ Transit trains hit on that line of track today (though Adams also saw the car behind him explode shortly afterward).

The biggest reason trains on the northeast corridor will never go as fast as their global counterparts isn’t a lack of ingenuity, investment, or interest, but the bends in the tracks: trains have to slow down to tackle curves, and New Jersey rail is lousy with them. In many cases, the rails follow Native American trails that predate European colonization; in others, like the s-curve that runs through Elizabeth, they follow towpaths and highways from the 1770s. One area of track in South Jersey swings around what was once the estate of Joseph Bonaparte, who won a case at the Supreme Court preventing a rail line through his property. Attempts to build straighter lines meant going through towns, leading in some cases to local riots, or landslides; it was easier to build tracks along the meandering highways and turnpikes that already existed. Even when track straightening did happen — as it did after the Civil War around Princeton — it didn’t make things any more convenient: That straightening meant moving the trains to Princeton Junction, and doomed decades to the Dinky.

For almost a century, there have been attempts to run high-speed trains through New Jersey. In the 1930s, the diesel-electric Comet was hitting 110 miles per hour on the New Haven line. The TurboTrain of the 1960s could hit 170 outside of Princeton Junction (those straight tracks paid off), but averaged about 60. The Metroliner, first run in 1969, could go 160, but drew too much power from the overhead lines to be reliable. The Acela — and its upcoming replacement — was marred by a botched rollout but has been, by far, the best attempt at bringing high-speed rail to New Jersey. But without straight tracks, nothing approaching the trains of other developed countries is likely to happen.

Some have argued that the problem is government ownership, and that private industry would do a better job (or at least couldn’t do worse). Alff quotes Heritage Foundation economist Stephen Moore writing, in 1990, “Imagine what Donald Trump could do with passenger rail service” (eventually Moore was on then-President Trump’s economic team and authored a chapter of the now infamous “Project 2025” book). Of course, Amtrak was formed largely because passenger rail hadn’t been profitable in decades, and despite a statutory requirement to the contrary, Amtrak has never turned a profit, nor had enough money to do everything that customers and legislators want it to do, and that was before Reagan-era funding cuts, which reduced its subsidy in half over the 1980s. The trains of the northeast corridor were run by a succession of private companies until the formation of Amtrak, and their record of deferring maintenance and paying dividends rather than serving travelers is consistent. If nothing else, there are a lot fewer major rail accidents than there were when private companies were in charge.

Many of the delays this summer were caused by power line problems. Alff makes it clear that these issues, too, have roots in the deep history of the corridor. A horrific wreck near Danbury led to a ban on steam trains; a series of electrocutions led to a ban on third-rail designs. Catenary lines were the one technology of the time that was left; trains built with them in mind means that we can’t replace them without rebuilding the trains and tracks from the ground up.

A point Alff makes repeatedly is the difference in approaches between the train system in the United States and that of other countries. Rail service in other countries is seen as a technology to move people around efficiently: its infrastructure is no different than highways and not expected to make money. Moreover, just as many developed countries with universal health care got it in the wake of World War II, when widespread devastation left a vacuum, it may have been easier to build straight, efficient, fast rail lines in areas that had been destroyed.

The other part of the problem is national politics. There have always been proponents of rail trying to better fund the system. But the people living along the corridor are disproportionately Democratic (Alff puts the figure at 70% supporting Joe Biden in the 2020 presidential election), and disproportionately wealthy. Getting officials from other parts of the country to fund rail service for this one area has been difficult.

Alff’s history of the northeast corridor ends on upbeat notes about Moynihan Hall and the success of the Acela, and as illuminating as the history is, it doesn’t provide much hope for fixing the problems that our rail system faces now. These problems facing our trains are nothing new, and neither are the responses from our leaders. Alff quotes an Amtrak ad from 1971, which pleads that fixing rail will “take time and work. But we’re going to do it. Just be patient.” More than fifty years later, we’re still waiting.