Behind the Scenes with NJ Transit

The night of Tuesday, August 17, was a fairly ordinary evening for trains moving in and out of Penn Station, unlike this past Tuesday, when an Amtrak power outage crippled train travel throughout the Northeast (We really have to worry about “low voltage” now, too? Sheesh). No rolling heatwaves or snowstorms had the system backed up for hours; heck, I’d even gotten to work on time that morning.
But it was still a pretty unusual commuting day for me, because I got a behind-the-scenes tour of the super-secret spots where every moment and movement of every train on the tracks are organized: Amtrak’s Penn Station Central Control (PSCC) and NJ Transit’s Transit Operations Center (TOC).

I’d been invited into the transit nerve-center by NJT spokesman Dan Stessel after I had written a post questioning a report of peachy-keen on-time performance by the transit agency. Just before the time I’d normally be waiting for the 5:47pm Midtown Direct to Maplewood, Stessel met me outside the PSCC (which is actually a little more than a block west of Penn Station). We were joined by Kevin O’Connor, NJT’s General Manager of Transportation for Rail Operations; and Clark Hampe, Senior Operations Planning Officer for Amtrak’s Northeast Division West. In an upstairs conference room that overlooks the two-story PSCC, the four of us dug through the massive amount of arrival-and-departure data streaming through the system in order to focus on the one thing that occupies a good deal of my attention twice a day: my train.
The PSCC has a Big Board, approximately 70 feet across, that uses color-coded lights to monitor the real-time movements of all Amtrak, Long Island Rail Road and NJ Transit trains throughout the tracks, tunnels, rail-yards and station platforms that comprise the Penn Station ecosystem. (For security reasons, I wasn’t allowed to take pictures or video of the facility.) Below the board, approximately 15 Amtrak and LIRR train dispatchers, along with a single NJ Transit liaison, keep tabs on which trains are going where and pass the information to crews at Sunnyside Yards in Queens, the people running the TOC in Penn Station, and even the crews on the trains themselves. If you’ve seen the movie War Games, imagine a train-centric version of the NORAD bunker and you’ll be pretty close to picturing the PSCC.
I asked O’Connor and Hampe to help me find the 5:47 on the Big Board while they explained everything that was going on. It quickly began to seem like an insanely complicated SAT math problem. About 23 trains an hour move through Penn Station during the peak periods, with an arrival or departure scheduled every 2 1/2 minutes. Watching the criss-crossing lights that represent each train coming and going through the station, it was easy to see that the problems that we all run into tend to begin with the very infrastructure of the system. Penn Station, O’Connor explained, was built as an intra-city facility and was not designed to handle the number of trains or passengers coming in and out of NJ every day. (By way of comparison, Grand Central Station runs roughly the same number of trains on twice the number of tracks, and only needs to coordinate a single service, Metro-North.)
The other big issue is the two-track tunnel under the Hudson River. As commuting patterns have changed over the years and NJ Transit and Amtrak have made changes to service or equipment, the tunnel has stubbornly remained one track in and one track out. On the Big Board, all of the Penn Station and LIRR lines formed an enormous web of lines, but on the left side it all narrowed down to just two rows of lights heading to Jersey. A single delayed or broken-down train anywhere along the tunnel’s tracks will send delays rippling through the system that can last, according to O’Connor, for several hours after the initial incident.
As I was taking in all of the action, I’d been searching the part of the Big Board that shows tracks 1 to 4, since that’s where the 5:47 typically shows up. I mentioned that it hadn’t been on those tracks even once over the last couple of weeks. O’Connor told me that ridership on my 8-car train had exceeded 92% of capacity, which triggers a change in how they dispatch. The high-demand departure had been bumped up to 9 cars, so it could no longer fit on the first 4 tracks, which max out at 8. Sure enough, as I looked higher up on the Big Board toward the longer tracks, there was my train slotting into place.
It was an instructive bit of information. I’m part of a small cadre of 5:47 riders who like to post up as early as possible (sometimes before the train has been announced for general boarding), and we’d been getting frustrated by the day-after-day absence of the train on the familiar tracks. We’d all grumpily assumed it was due to some foul-up or equipment shortage, but really it had been a change designed to make our ride better.
I pointed this out to Stessel, who works in NJT’s public-relations office. He suggested that the best way to stay on top of information like this is to sign up for My Transit Alerts and Advisories. I’d subscribed to the Alerts keyed to my specific commute, but Stessel says that getting the Advisories can also help riders stay on top of non-emergency changes like the one made to the 5:47. (He was not able to tell me for sure if this specific information had been in a previous Advisory, however.)
As I watched the clock tick past 5:47pm, Hampe and O’Connor showed me a train coming in from the Hudson tunnel, which was crossing one of the key switch-points in the Penn Station system. As it moved through the brightly lit X on the Big Board, the train not only was holding up my 5:47, but also halting pretty much everything. When a train is crossing from the tunnel’s mouth and onto one of the dozen-plus tracks leading to passenger platforms, everyone else has to wait. “The whole purpose is to keep the trains apart,” said Hampe, putting a fine point on the complications of keeping all these trains moving across multiple common points without crashing them into each other.
As I projected myself into a seat on the delayed Midtown Direct, it was difficult to balance the mechanical logic of the goings-on in the PSCC with the agida I experience as a passenger stuck during a delayed commute–not to mention the regularity of the problems NJ Transit has getting people from point A to B on time. My hosts said that their crews and staff have to work with what they’ve got: the volume of ridership along lines like the Midtown Direct keeps changing, the amount and type of equipment deployed keeps evolving, and the budgets and infrastructure don’t always keep up. “Allocating equipment is like balancing a checkbook,” said Hampe, who added that juggling Amtrak, LIRR and NJT is akin to doing it with multiple currencies.
By the time my tour had ended, I’d seen all of the people working all of the systems that move my train into Penn Station in the morning and out in the evening. In NJT’s TOC, I’d even gotten to put faces to the voices I hear on the overhead announcements every evening, which was oddly thrilling.
My train had left without me, and had left a little late: according to the computers in the TOC, it had been 7 minutes late coming out of Sunnyside Yards, had left Penn Station 1 minute behind schedule, and was running 2 minutes behind on the Jersey side of the tunnel. I had gotten a better understanding of why it had been delayed, which doesn’t quite make me feel better about the hours I spend on the rails every week. But the next day, as I was sitting on a delayed train, visualizing what my commute might look like on the Big Board was a good way to help pass the time waiting to get where I was going.
Story by Brian Glaser, a Baristanet contributor
Photo courtesy of NJ Transit