New Jersey Transit



New Jersey Transit Rail Operations, often shortened to simply New Jersey Transit and abbreviated as NJT is the backbone commuter rail system for the state of New Jersey. The system is comprised of ten distinct lines, all but one of which serve the Greater New York Metropolitan Area (one line serves Philadelphia and Atlantic City). The ten lines that exist today are all former lines of various competing private railroad companies: the Pennsylvania Railroad, the Erie-Lackawanna Railroad, the Delaware & Western Railroad, the Central Railroad of New Jersey, and the Reading Company. These companies operated many more routes and services under private ownership but only certain main lines survived into the state-supported transportation era. Today, operations are split into two divisions: the Hoboken Division, which consists of former Erie-Lackawanna and Delaware & Western Lines operating to and from Hoboken Terminal; and the Newark Division, which consists of the former Pennsylvania, Jersey Central, and Reading Company Lines that generally operate through Newark Penn Station (all but one of the lines in this division serve Newark), with many continuing on to New York Penn Station. While the equipment used on both divisions is generally interoperable with the other division, conductors, engineers, and other employees generally don't switch between divisions within a given assignment period. While it is possible and actually somewhat common to be qualified and certified in both divisions, there are separate training programs for each.

In the present day, all but one of the ten currently operating lines are part of a coherent network that use a common ticketing system and provide transfers between each other, with said transfers generally occurring at Secaucus Junction (though there are exceptions to this). This enables passengers to make intermediate trips between destinations on two different lines, without having to ride all the way downtown on one line and travel to a different terminal to essentially reverse direction on a different line operated by a different company (as people used to do in previous decades). The Atlantic City Line shares the same common ticketing system as the lines serving New York but is physically disconnected from the rest of the system and does not pass through any of the central transfer points.

An interesting tidbit of information is that each of the ten lines has its own symbol or icon that is displayed on timetables and used in some public communications related to the line. These symbols are representative of either physical landmarks, geographic features, or historical events that have occurred either on the line itself, or in the towns and cities that the line serves. This practice is found in only one other place in America, on the New Mexico Rail Runner Express serving the suburbs of Albuquerque (in that case, each station has its own symbol since the system consists of only one line).

New Jersey Transit also operates an extensive bus transportation network, consisting of local routes within urban areas, connectors that link urban locations with their surrounding suburbs (usually feeding into a train station at one or both ends), as well as a few intercity express routes that utilize full-scale coach buses. This bus system however is out of scope for American Rails Wiki and will not be discussed at length.