What does the history of New Jersey railroads tell us about its ongoing dysfunction? • New Jersey Monitor

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

Last summer, there were days of mass cancellations and delays due to sagging power lines. It’s been more than six months since the service last met its self-imposed target of 94.7% on-time performance (and that’s despite the rather flexible definition of “on-time”). As anyone who has traveled to the European Union, Japan or China can attest, rail travel in other countries is generally faster, cheaper and more reliable than it is here. The question is why this is the case and what can be done about it.

Some of the answers can be found in the history of rail 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 compiled a history of rail in the Northeast Corridor and shows that few of the problems we face today are new and that almost all of them stem from a confluence of shortcuts and short-sighted, strategy-less decisions.

Alff’s historical work documents how current problems are nothing new. During the Civil War, passengers complained that the cars on New Jersey’s Camden & Amboy trains were “crammed to suffocation” and “prone to delays.” One congressman accused the line of fraud “almost as insidious” as that of the Confederacy. Still, it is a little unsettling to read that John Quincy Adams measured the speed of a train outside New York City at a speed faster than some NJ Transit trains that run on that line today (though Adams also saw the car behind him explode shortly afterward).

The main reason trains on the Northeastern Corridor will never run as fast as their counterparts elsewhere is not a lack of ingenuity, investment or interest, but the curves in the tracks: Trains must slow down to negotiate curves, and New Jersey rail is full of them. In many cases, the tracks follow Native American trails that predate European colonization; in others, like the S-curve through Elizabeth, they follow towpaths and highways dating to the 1770s. One stretch of track in South Jersey loops around the former estate of Joseph Bonaparte, who won a Supreme Court case preventing a rail line through his property. Attempts to build straighter tracks meant running through towns, in some cases leading to local unrest or landslides; it was easier to build tracks along the winding highways and toll roads that already existed. Even when the tracks were straightened—as they were in the Princeton area after the Civil War—it didn’t make things easier: Straightening meant that trains had to be moved to Princeton Junction, and was a fate for the Dinky that would last for decades.

Attempts to run high-speed rail through New Jersey have been going on for nearly a century. In the 1930s, the diesel-electric Comet reached 110 mph on the New Haven line. The TurboTrain of the 1960s could reach 170 mph outside Princeton Junction (the straight tracks paid off), but averaged about 60. The Metroliner, which first began service in 1969, could run 160 mph, but drew too much power from overhead wires to be reliable. The Acela — and its upcoming successor — were marred by a botched rollout, but were by far the best attempts to bring high-speed rail to New Jersey. But without straight tracks, there’s probably nothing that can match the trains of other developed countries.

Some argue that the problem is government ownership and that private industry would do better (or at least couldn’t do worse). Alff quotes Heritage Foundation economist Stephen Moore, who wrote in 1990, “Imagine what Donald Trump could do to mass transit” (Moore was, after all, on then-President Trump’s economic team and wrote a chapter in the now-infamous book Project 2025). Of course, Amtrak was created primarily because mass transit hadn’t been profitable for decades, and despite legislative mandates to the contrary, Amtrak has never made a profit or had enough money to do everything customers and lawmakers asked it to do, and that was before the Reagan-era funding cuts that halved subsidies over the course of the 1980s. The Northeast Corridor trains were operated by a number of private companies until Amtrak was created, and their record of deferring maintenance and paying dividends rather than serving travelers is consistent. At least there are far fewer serious railway accidents today than there were when private companies were responsible.

Many of the delays this summer were due to problems with power lines. Alff makes clear that these problems, too, have their roots in the corridor’s long history. A horrific accident near Danbury led to a ban on steam trains; a series of electrocutions led to a ban on power rail designs. Overhead wires were the only technology left then; trains built for them mean we can’t replace them without rebuilding the trains and tracks from scratch.

One point Alff makes repeatedly is the difference between the approaches to the rail system in the United States and those of other countries. In other countries, rail is seen as a technology to move people efficiently: its infrastructure is no different from highways and is not expected to make money. Moreover, when widespread devastation left a vacuum, it may have been easier to build straight, efficient, and fast rail lines in devastated areas, as many industrialized countries with universal health insurance were able to do after World War II.

The other part of the problem is national politics. There have always been rail advocates trying to better fund the system. But the people who live along the corridor are disproportionately Democrats (Alff estimates 70% are supporting Joe Biden in the 2020 presidential election) and disproportionately wealthy. It’s been difficult to get officials from other parts of the country to fund rail service for this one area.

Alff’s history of the Northeast Corridor ends with optimistic remarks about Moynihan Hall and the success of the Acela. As insightful as that history is, it offers little hope for a solution to the problems currently facing our rail system. These problems facing our trains are nothing new, and neither are the reactions of our politicians. Alff cites a 1971 Amtrak ad that said fixing the tracks “will take time and labor. But we will do it. Just be patient.” More than fifty years later, we are still waiting for it.