For eight seasons, on selected Sundays, football trains carried passengers from Connecticut straight through Penn Station to New Jersey. The region’s commuter railroads haven’t done that before or since. But only the train went through. Fares, schedules, and the last leg to the stadium stayed split among the railroads, and now that Amtrak says a rebuilt Penn will have through-running, that split is the problem to solve.
On Sunday, September 20, 2009, a train carrying football fans left Connecticut on Metro-North’s New Haven Line. At New Rochelle it didn’t head for Grand Central. It swung onto Amtrak’s Hell Gate Line instead, across the Bronx, over the Hell Gate Bridge, through Queens, and under the East River into Penn Station. That’s where every other commuter train unloads. The fans stayed put. A Metro-North crew handed the train to an NJ TRANSIT crew on the platform, and about 13 minutes later it pulled out under the Hudson for Secaucus Junction, where the fans changed to a second train for the last 2.5 miles to the Meadowlands.
It’s the only time the region’s commuter railroads have run passenger service through Penn. Amtrak’s Northeast Corridor trains do it every day. Commuter trains that keep going past the platforms go empty, out to yards like Sunnyside in Queens or the West Side Yard in Manhattan. The main obstacle is how New York runs its railroads. It has one of the biggest passenger-rail networks in the world, and it runs it as four separate railroads. The Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) runs two of them: Metro-North, which covers the northern suburbs and Connecticut, and the Long Island Rail Road (LIRR). NJ TRANSIT runs New Jersey’s. Amtrak owns Penn Station and most of the track on either side. Each one writes its own schedules, sets its own fares, qualifies its own crews, and answers for its own turf.
Running a train through the station with its passengers still aboard is called through-running. Regional rail goes a step further: a network of through routes with one set of fares, one source of information, and one agency on the hook for the whole trip. The “Train to the Game” tried the first and never tried the second. LIRR and subway riders could get on at Penn, but each railroad kept its own fares and its own information, and getting to the stadium still meant changing trains.
The trains ran on a published schedule for eight seasons, and everything that made them possible also boxed them in. The pilot didn’t add a single train under the Hudson. It just extended NJ TRANSIT trains that were already running, and east of Penn it used whatever Sunday space was free in the East River Tunnels, where dispatchers could hold it for other traffic. NJ TRANSIT lent the locomotives and cars and needed them back for the Monday commute, so late games were hard to serve. After the first agreement ran out, Amtrak renewed it one year at a time, and either side could walk away on 30 days’ notice. This was a handful of trains on quiet Sunday tracks. It never showed whether Penn could handle through-trains all day, in both directions, on a weekday.
That’s why it matters now. Amtrak and the U.S. Department of Transportation are planning a rebuilt Penn Station, and Amtrak has promised it will include “at least limited through-running.” The football train is the only real test the region has run. The agreements the railroads signed and the riders they counted show what three railroads had to settle to move one train across the station, what they never settled, and how fast the service shrank once money got tight.
It started with a speech about a different trip. On May 5, 2006, Eliot Spitzer, then New York’s attorney general and running for governor, told the Regional Plan Association, a nonprofit planning group, that New York should coordinate its commuter railroads with New Jersey’s and Connecticut’s.
His example was New Brunswick, New Jersey, to Mineola, Long Island. That trip crosses NJ TRANSIT and LIRR territory, and it has always meant changing trains at Penn. A one-seat ride would let you stay put. His bigger point was that the region could win riders by getting the lines it already had to work together, before building new ones.
“We should undertake several important regional initiatives in partnership with New Jersey and Connecticut. Enabling what the experts call regional transit interoperability could make possible a one-seat ride from New Brunswick in New Jersey to Mineola on Long Island.”Eliot Spitzer, Regional Plan Association Regional Assembly, May 5, 2006
Once in office, Spitzer put Elliot G. Sander in charge of the MTA. Sander’s argument was that travel had outgrown the map the railroads were built on. More trips now went suburb to suburb, across state lines, and across the boundaries between one railroad and the next. Serving them would take the MTA, Amtrak, NJ TRANSIT, and the New Jersey Sports and Exposition Authority, which ran the Meadowlands complex then, all agreeing.
“The MTA, along with the LIRR and Metro-North, is working with Amtrak, NJ Transit and the New Jersey Sports and Exposition Authority on launching a pilot regional rail interoperability project.”Elliot G. Sander, Crain’s Breakfast Forum, June 5, 2007
What they came up with was small on purpose. New Haven Line riders would get a direct train through Penn to Secaucus for early Sunday Giants and Jets games, and people coming from Long Island or the subway could get on at Penn. Sander pitched it as a practical test, something that could shape regular commuter service later.
The Permanent Citizens Advisory Committee to the MTA (PCAC), the state-created body behind the MTA’s three rider councils, held it to a tougher standard. Its 2009 report Going the Distance said regional integration takes three things: trains and buses that connect, fares that work across agencies, and information that shows a passenger the whole trip. The pilot got the first one right. Its trouble was with the other two.
There was never a one-seat ride to the stadium. Amtrak controlled the track and every move from New Rochelle through Penn into New Jersey, and the trip ended with a change of trains at Secaucus.
At Secaucus, anyone going to the game had to get off. The train stopped on the upper level, which carries the Northeast Corridor, the main line between Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and Washington. Riders went downstairs to tracks running crosswise underneath and caught a Meadowlands Rail Line train, which ran from Hoboken Terminal to Meadowlands Station with Secaucus as its only stop in between. That last ride took about 10 minutes.
A later Gateway Program proposal, the Secaucus Junction and Bergen Loop, would tie that lower level into the Northeast Corridor. It didn’t exist during the pilot. It’s also a different project from the unbuilt Meadowlands loop that comes up later.
The trip started on Metro-North’s New Haven Line, with a handful of stops in Connecticut and Westchester, and ran to New Rochelle, where Metro-North’s line meets Amtrak’s line into Penn Station.
Stops differed by gameMetro-North-operated segmentAt New Rochelle the train left the usual Metro-North route into Grand Central and took Amtrak’s Hell Gate Line instead: across the Bronx, over the Hell Gate Bridge, through Queens, and into Penn through the East River tunnels. Before they could run it, Metro-North engineers and conductors had to learn Amtrak’s rules and get qualified on Amtrak track.
About 35 minutes to PennAmtrak-controlled trackPassengers stayed in their seats at Penn. The crew didn’t: Metro-North stepped off, NJ TRANSIT stepped on, and after a scheduled stop of about 13 minutes the train ran eight minutes through the Hudson River tunnels to Secaucus.
About 13 minutes at PennSame train, different crewMeadowlands passengers got off at Secaucus. Their train didn’t go to the stadium. It kept going southwest as a regular NJ TRANSIT train to Trenton, Dover, or Long Branch, depending on the departure.
Passengers leave the trainOriginal train continues westRiders walked downstairs from the Northeast Corridor platforms to the Meadowlands Rail Line. The tracks cross at different levels and never touch, which is why the stadium train had to run as its own service, separate from everything above it.
Transfer between station levelsA separate Meadowlands trainTwo documents set the terms. One was a 2008 operating agreement between Metro-North and Amtrak; the other, a 2009 memorandum of understanding between Metro-North and NJ TRANSIT. A memorandum of understanding says how organizations plan to work together. On its own, it doesn’t make anyone run a train. Between them, though, the two documents sorted out equipment, crews, fares, access charges, and who was responsible when something went wrong.
“All trains operated … will be extensions of trains regularly scheduled … and, accordingly, there will be no increase in the number of NJ TRANSIT trains operating via the North River tunnels.”Metro-North–Amtrak Agreement Regarding Football Game Service Pilot, November 2008
The agreements, segment by segment
| Responsibility | New Haven LineNew Haven to New Rochelle | Hell Gate LineNew Rochelle to Penn | Penn Stationthe stop | Northeast CorridorPenn to Secaucus | Meadowlands Rail LineSecaucus to the stadium |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Track and dispatching | Metro-North | Amtrak | AmtrakPenn Station Central Control | Amtrak | NJ TRANSIT |
| Crew and legal operator | Metro-North | Metro-North | HandoffNJ TRANSIT conductor relieves Metro-North conductor on the platform | NJ TRANSIT | NJ TRANSITa separate train |
| Equipment | NJ TRANSITleased to Metro-North | NJ TRANSITleased to Metro-North | NJ TRANSIT | NJ TRANSIT | NJ TRANSITa different train |
| Ticket | Joint ticket sold by Metro-Northrevenue reconciled between the two railroads | NJ TRANSIT staffchecked tickets by hand at the Secaucus fare gates | |||
East of Penn, the pilot ran on spare Sunday space in the four East River Tunnels between Penn and Queens, and dispatchers could move other trains ahead of it. The railroads went over the schedule every year. The pilot never had a slot, meaning a reserved time and path on a crowded piece of railroad.
The number people quote most, $22,287, was an example, in 2007 dollars, of what Metro-North might pay NJ TRANSIT to rent three full trains for one day. It wasn’t what the service cost. Amtrak billed separately for track access and electricity, and training, inspections, ticket handling, and breakdowns all cost money too. The records that survive don’t have enough final invoices to work out the public subsidy per rider.
2009 season
| Measure | What the agreements show |
|---|---|
| Sample charge for NJ TRANSIT equipment | $22,287 per service day in 2007 dollars, covering three complete trains, the maintenance allocated to them, and technician support. |
| Average fare revenue in 2009 | About $7,525 per game. |
| Fare revenue against the sample rental charge | About 34 percent in 2009, and roughly 10 to 34 percent across the reported years. |
| Amtrak track access and electricity | Charged separately by the distance each locomotive and car moved, including empty repositioning trips. |
| Other costs billed or assigned separately | Crew training, equipment testing, ticket inspection, repairs, substitute transportation, permits, and added operating support. |
| Charge for using scarce track capacity | Amtrak waived it for the pilot, so the accounts never priced the schedule space the service consumed. |
The table leaves out costs nobody added up, so the real gap was bigger. Fares never covered even the equipment rental.
NJ TRANSIT supplied electric locomotives and up to ten double-deck cars. These were push-pull sets: the locomotive sits at one end, and a cab at the other end lets the train reverse without moving the locomotive around. NJ TRANSIT leased them to Metro-North for the part of the trip east of Penn.
Metro-North crews couldn’t just take their usual train onto someone else’s railroad. They had to learn NJ TRANSIT’s equipment. They had to qualify on Amtrak territory and prove they knew the operating rulebook the northeastern railroads share, and the trains themselves had to pass tests for power, signals, brakes, and inspection on every piece of the route.
At Penn, passengers stayed in the same cars while the railroad legally responsible for them changed on the platform: Metro-North to NJ TRANSIT going west, the other way around going east. Amtrak ran the station. Its control center decided how the train moved through Penn and the tunnels the whole time.
Penn Station, westbound
A Metro-North crew brings the train in from New Rochelle through the East River tunnels. Until it stops, it is a Metro-North train.
The original plan called for three passenger trains out before a game, three back after, and six empty trips to get the equipment where it needed to be. Late kickoffs were trouble. NJ TRANSIT needed its equipment back for Monday morning.
You could buy one ticket marked for the Meadowlands. Behind it, Metro-North, the LIRR, and NJ TRANSIT still set their own fares and split the money. The gates at Secaucus couldn’t read MTA tickets, so staff checked them by hand. At Penn, the eastbound football train didn’t even appear on the public departure boards, so riders went by announcements and whatever staff told them.
Daniel O’Connell, Metro-North’s director of operations planning, reported on the first season to the Metro-North Railroad Commuter Council (MNRCC), the railroad’s official rider council. His report was upbeat. The trains ran smoothly, customer satisfaction was good, and the service carried about 6,000 trips. He also called it “a huge effort,” and he said riders needed clearer directions at Secaucus, where the trip broke in two.
When a train broke down, whichever railroad controlled that stretch had to arrange the rescue or a substitute ride.
Four months before the pilot’s first train, Metro-North opened the Yankees–E. 153rd Street station in the Bronx. Both were new event services in 2009, but only the Bronx station was permanent and run by a single railroad. Regular Hudson Line trains stopped there. Special Harlem and New Haven Line trains got there through the Mott Haven wye, a triangle of track that lets trains switch among Metro-North’s three main lines. There were shuttles from Grand Central, too.
Metro-North’s first-year report to the MNRCC shows how far the station reached. The railroad counted about 500,000 rides after it opened, roughly 450,000 of them to or from games. Of the game riders, 35 percent came from the Hudson Line, 30 percent from the New Haven Line, 25 percent from the Harlem Line, and the rest on Grand Central shuttles. People knew the trains, and parking at the stadium started at $28, so the train was the easy call.
Within months the Yankees trains were just part of what Metro-North does. The railroad could add trains, move schedules around game times, and tell riders what was going on, all with its own systems. The Meadowlands train never got there. It stayed an exception, with its equipment, schedule, and information all in two other railroads’ hands.
Numbers the MTA released under New York’s Freedom of Information Law (FOIL) show the gap. For one early-season game starting at 1:05 p.m., Metro-North counted 1,933 arrivals and 1,764 departures at Yankees–E. 153rd Street: 3,697 passenger movements, counting someone who comes and goes as two. The Meadowlands pilot averaged 647 movements a game in 2009, 342 going and 305 coming back.
That’s about 5.7 times as many at the Yankees station. It isn’t a perfect comparison. The Yankees number covers a whole station, the football number one New Haven Line service. The Bronx station drew on three established lines at once, while the pilot drew on one, and that one ended in a transfer.
One game, two kinds of service
Where Yankees game riders came from, first season
The same count shows how fast the Bronx station emptied out. Metro-North logged 941 departures in one 15-minute stretch, more than half of everyone leaving, and 79 percent within 45 minutes. The track layout explains it. Trains could pull in from one direction, load, and keep going, while a terminal has to back every train out the way it came.
PCAC’s accounts at the time called the new Yankees station a “rousing success” and the Meadowlands train a first for the region and unusually labor-intensive. The February 2010 MNRCC minutes record both from the same meeting.
The first train ran September 20, 2009. Each game got three passenger trains out and three back, plus six empty trips to move equipment, and over nine games that first season the pilot carried 5,826 trips. That’s 647 a game.
Then the MTA’s 2010 money crisis hit. At the same February meeting where Metro-North went over the Yankees and Meadowlands results, the railroad was lining up broader cuts and shorter trains. The football service went from six passenger trips a game to two: one train out, one back.
Scheduled service was cut by 67 percent, and ridership fell only 17 percent. On November 28, 2010, one inbound train carried 401 people.
Hover or focus a season for its full figures.
With one train each way, missing the one out meant finding another way to the stadium, and missing the one back meant waiting hours or improvising a way home. The pilot ran like that until January 1, 2017. Nothing in these records says why the railroads ended it.
2010 timetable · Sunday 1 p.m. games
Super Bowl XLVIII didn’t use the Train to the Game. The February 2014 game wasn’t an early Sunday kickoff, the only kind the pilot covered, so fans took regular trains to Secaucus and changed there for NJ TRANSIT’s separate 2.5-mile Meadowlands train.
Planners expected 10,000 to 12,000 people by rail. About 28,000 came by train, and an estimated 33,000 to 35,000 tried to leave by rail after the game. It broke down between Secaucus and the stadium, not at Penn. Meadowlands Station is a stub end: the track just stops, so every train that pulls in has to back out before it can leave. That terminal and the one track leading to it couldn’t handle a crowd leaving all at once, and people waited for hours.
How a crowd leaves by train
Super Bowl XLVIII rail riders against the plan
The line that opened in 2009 came out of a study finished four years earlier. The 2005 final environmental impact statement looked at seven possible alignments and picked a 9,500-foot route connected to the Pascack Valley Line by a wye, a triangle of track that lets trains enter a branch from either direction. That became the Meadowlands Rail Line.
Planners didn’t mean for the station to stay the end of the line. The New Jersey Meadowlands Commission’s 2004 master plan, Meadowlands Mobility 2030, laid it out in two phases: a funded, $150 million spur off the Pascack Valley Line, and a second, $350 million spur off the Bergen County Line that would loop north of Secaucus Junction and join the first. The plan listed Phase II as concept development, funding required. It never got further than that. If it had been built, trains could have come into the Meadowlands one way and left the other, instead of backing out of a dead end.
Meadowlands Mobility 2030 (2004)
As built: trains leave the Pascack Valley Line, run to Meadowlands Station, stop at the end of the track, and back out the way they came. The next train waits until the track clears.
Fifteen years later, the loop still wasn’t built. On April 7, 2019, WrestleMania 35 was at MetLife Stadium, and NJ TRANSIT riders again waited two to three hours to get out of Meadowlands Station by train. State Sen. Paul Sarlo, whose 36th District includes the Meadowlands, told NJBIZ that the station’s single track had turned it into “a one-way street that goes to a dead end,” a system that “becomes all but paralyzed” by a schedule change, an equipment problem, or a big crowd. He named the fix the master plan had proposed and never paid for: “The only way to really correct this problem is to complete the loop so that trains stopping at Meadowlands Station can travel forward to Secaucus Junction.” MetLife, he said, was “still living with the unwanted legacy of the chaotic delays following the 2014 Super Bowl.”
Both times, a through route would have kept arriving trains out of the way of departing ones and given dispatchers more ways to move trains when the crowd was bigger than anyone planned for.
The split the football train ran into is older than Amtrak and older than the MTA. In the early 1950s, New York and New Jersey set up the Metropolitan Rapid Transit Commission to study the region’s rail problem and recommend who should run it. They gave it five years and $100,000.
The studies the commissioners wanted cost a lot more than that. Whoever paid the difference would get a say in what got asked and what got recommended. The Port of New York Authority had the money.
Its terms came in a memorandum of understanding. The commissioners first saw it on the evening of January 5, 1955. It asked them to give “full recognition” to the Port Authority’s position that it could take on only facilities that would be self-supporting “in and of themselves.”
It also asked them to accept something else. Every earlier Port Authority study, it said, had found that the region’s rail transit couldn’t pass that test. And the revenue estimates couldn’t count any conversion of the line to freight, which ruled out the one change that might have made the numbers work.
It changed two more things. It dropped the joint rail-and-road planning the commission had called for in its 1954 report, and it asked the transit agency to accept that saving rail service didn’t conflict with the Port Authority’s plans, shared with Triborough, to expand the region’s highways.
And it gave the Port Authority joint control of the work. The two agencies would pick consultants and make policy together, and a project director would run the studies instead of the commission’s own staff.
Jameson W. Doig, who wrote up the episode for Columbia University Press in 1966, concluded that together these terms made it very hard for the studies to recommend giving the Port Authority any role in rail transit. The group set up to decide who should run the region’s railroads had agreed, before any research started, that the region’s richest transportation agency wouldn’t.
Ten years went by, and the studies produced no regional transit agency. In 1964, with the Long Island Rail Road having its worst year since it came out of bankruptcy, Governor Nelson Rockefeller named a committee under William J. Ronan to draft a rescue. It recommended that the state buy the railroad and set up a Metropolitan Commuter Transportation Authority to run it and carry out a $200 million modernization. The legislature passed the bill that spring, and the authority started in June 1965.
The MCTA could run commuter service anywhere in the New York part of the region. The governor appointed all five members. They served overlapping eight-year terms, and no state utility commission reviewed their decisions on fares or schedules. Its rail job had nothing to do with highway planning, on Long Island or anywhere else. Doig, writing a few months after it was created, called it one more semi-autonomous authority set up to handle a piece of the metropolitan transportation problem.
It became the Metropolitan Transportation Authority in 1968. Forty-four years after the authority was created, a football train crossed Penn Station under one of its railroads, changed crews on the platform, and kept going west under another. Neither state ever gave one agency the whole regional network.
From the 1950s to 2026
Who runs the railroads
New York and New Jersey create the Metropolitan Rapid Transit Commission, with a five-year life and $100,000.
The commission’s report urges joint planning of rail and roads.
Commissioners first see the Port Authority’s memorandum. It drops joint planning and gives the Port Authority joint control of the studies.
Governor Rockefeller appoints the Ronan committee to rescue the Long Island Rail Road.
New York establishes the Metropolitan Commuter Transportation Authority.
The authority takes the name Metropolitan Transportation Authority.
Amtrak begins service.
Metro-North begins operating, and NJ TRANSIT takes over New Jersey’s commuter trains.
The pilot
Eliot Spitzer proposes a one-seat ride from New Brunswick to Mineola.
MTA chief Elliot Sander announces a pilot with Amtrak, NJ TRANSIT, and the New Jersey Sports and Exposition Authority.
Metro-North and Amtrak sign the football service agreement.
The first football train carries passengers through Penn Station.
The MTA’s financial crisis cuts the service to one train each way.
Super Bowl XLVIII crowds jam the Meadowlands terminal.
The last football train runs.
WrestleMania 35 riders wait two to three hours to leave the Meadowlands.
Penn Station now
The Federal Railroad Administration begins its Service Optimization Study.
Amtrak and the U.S. Department of Transportation select Penn Transformation Partners to plan and build the station project.
The railroads went over the pilot’s Sunday slots every year. Planned tunnel work could bump them. And once the first agreement ran out, there was nothing underneath the service at all: no permanent right to its schedule, no budget of its own, nobody obligated to keep it going.
Going the Distance had warned that thin, unreliable weekend service keeps people from traveling around the region. The pilot only existed because Sunday traffic was light. That same fact tied it to the games and hours when there was track to spare.
It took three railroads’ crews, rules, and agreements to move one train across Penn. Rebuilt tracks and platforms can make that easier. The railroads still need one timetable, trains and crews that can work every line in the service, and one office in charge when something breaks.
PCAC’s earlier fare research judged a regional system by one thing, the passenger’s whole trip. By that standard the pilot fell short. It got a train across Penn and left nobody responsible for the trip from the first station to the stadium.
Through-running has to feel like one service to the rider: one fare that makes sense, the same information before and during the trip, and clear directions when a connection falls apart or a train runs late. Nobody should have to know which railroad owns which track to get where they’re going.
The pilot’s costs were spread across agencies and never added up, and responsibility for a broken-down train changed hands at every territorial line. A permanent service can’t work that way. It needs a full budget and one person in charge, both lined up before the first breakdown.
Through-running at Penn did nothing for the last leg. Stadium riders still changed at Secaucus, and the Super Bowl showed how badly the dead-end terminal could jam on a day the pilot wasn’t even running. The Bergen County Line loop wouldn’t have gotten rid of that transfer, but it would have given Meadowlands trains a second way out instead of backing every train out of one terminal.
In May 2026, the U.S. Department of Transportation and Amtrak picked Penn Transformation Partners, led by the construction firms Halmar and Skanska, to help plan and build the station project. The current concept leaves Madison Square Garden where it is, on top of the station, and centers on a new train hall on Eighth Avenue, wider passenger areas, and easier ways between the platforms and the street.
For the trains themselves, the commitment that counts is Amtrak’s statement that the project will provide “at least limited through-running on the regional rail network.” That doesn’t require Penn South. Penn South is the separate expansion that would push the station into the blocks just south of it and tear down buildings, including those on Block 780. There’s another way, and it starts inside the station as it is: convert tracks and platforms a few at a time, as specific pairs of routes get ready to share equipment and run through.
The Federal Railroad Administration, the national rail-safety and investment agency, started a roughly 18-month Service Optimization Study in October 2025. That study should name the first through route. It should do it before the station design is locked, and it should be specific: which services connect, how often the trains run, how long they sit at Penn, what happens when a late train misses its slot.
A route pair matches a line coming in one side of Penn with a line going out the other, say a Metro-North route from Connecticut with an NJ TRANSIT route in New Jersey. Philadelphia did this when it tied its separate commuter railroads together through the Center City tunnel. Its planners compared ridership, trip length, frequency, equipment, and yard access before deciding which lines went together. Penn should pick its pairs the same way.
The first phase should be a mix. Most trains would keep starting or ending at Penn, and a few chosen routes would run through on a regular schedule. Amtrak’s own 2014 study landed in a similar place: through-running is technically possible, how much capacity it adds depends on the operating plan, and it expected trains that end at Penn to keep running next to trains that pass through. “Limited” should mean the first published step, with more routes and dates behind it.
Illustrative
Today every commuter train ends its passenger trip at Penn, then reverses or runs empty to a yard.
Timing matters too. Britain’s 2018 expansion of Thameslink, the cross-London network that runs suburban trains through the city center, brought months of cancellations and delays because the track work, timetables, crew training, and management decisions weren’t ready at the same time. Penn’s first route pair shouldn’t carry passengers until its timetable has been tested in trial runs and its trains, crews, and chain of command are ready.
A real first phase names its routes, reserves their slots, and runs useful service all day. It also publishes the order the next routes come in. Each phase should work as a complete service on its own while leaving room to convert more tracks and platforms inside the existing station. Before anything gets built, the railroads should check the construction plan against that operating plan. Otherwise the concrete can rule it out.
The pilot ran its last train on New Year’s Day 2017, and nothing replaced it. Nothing about it was permanent: no reserved slot, no shared timetable, no office responsible for the whole trip. Penn’s rebuild could end up the same way at a far higher price, unless the first through route carries commuters on an ordinary Tuesday and the railroads have already announced the next ones.
These are the documents behind this article: the original pilot proposal, the customer brochure, the agreements between the railroads, and the annual ridership and revenue figures. The 2005 Meadowlands rail alternatives analysis records the planning history for the Pascack Valley Line connection that was built, and the Bergen County Line extension that was not. The NJMC’s 2004 master plan priced that extension. A 2019 NJBIZ interview with State Sen. Paul Sarlo shows the same terminal design still failing fifteen years after the master plan.
The 2008 Metro-North–Amtrak operating agreement and the 2009 Metro-North–NJ TRANSIT memorandum of understanding, which set the equipment, crews, charges, and liabilities behind the service. All 36 pages appear below; scroll inside the viewer.
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Open the complete document in a browser tabThe 2007 Connecticut Department of Transportation report that proposed the pilot as a route into Penn Station. All 8 pages appear below; scroll inside the viewer.
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Open the complete document in a browser tabThe customer brochure the railroads used to sell the service. All 7 pages appear below; scroll inside the viewer.
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Open the complete document in a browser tab| Year | Games | Riders | Average per game | Revenue |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2009 | 9 | 5,826 | 647 | $67,727 |
| 2010 | 9 | 4,837 | 537 | $56,230 |
| 2011 | 10 | 4,030 | 403 | $46,849 |
| 2012 | 10 | 3,041 | 304 | $35,352 |
| 2013 | 10 | 2,572 | 257 | $29,900 |
| 2014 | 12 | 3,835 | 320 | $44,582 |
| 2015 | 11 | 2,689 | 244 | $31,260 |
| 2016 | 11 | 2,170 | 197 | $25,226 |
| Total revenue | $337,126 | |||