Montclair-Boonton Weekend Service Campaign

At last we have weekend service! It’s limited: only every two hours, and only as far as Bay Street. But it's a start, and we’re still pushing to get it extended farther out the line. Stay tuned.

NJ-ARP member Jack May has prepared a history of how it came about. What really got movement from N.J. Transit was Montclair mayor Jerry Fried’s presentation to the N.J. Transit Board on Wednesday, June 10th, when he presented supporting letters from the local congressional delegation, state legislators, and mayors of towns from Newark to Little Falls. Copies of the letters are available here. See these articles in the Montclair Times and sister papers, Star-Ledger, Bergen Record, Baristanet.com, and TheJerseyTomatoPress.com. In summer 2008, NJ-ARP members gathered nearly a thousand petition signatures in support of weekend service. Montclair State students, in particular, were hugely supportive.

Here were some of the arguments we presented.

Have you wanted to take the train to the City on the weekends—only to find there’s no train on the weekends?
Have you then filled your tank with $4/gallon gasoline, gotten stuck in tunnel traffic, and circled like a vulture through Manhattan streets for parking, or shelled out another $40 for a garage—when all you needed was a train line that ran on weekends?
Have you invited friends from the City to visit on weekends—only to have them balk when they learn they have to take a bus? And with DeCamp’s level of service, can you blame them?
Have you had friends visiting from elsewhere in the country or world who wanted to go into the City on the weekend?
Have you ever wanted to move around within the area on weekends—for example, to visit the farmers’ market, attend an event at Montclair State, or go down to the shore?

NJ-ARP members and our allies have been working to find out exactly why N.J. Transit keeps putting off weekend service and what we can do to encourage them along. If they continue to refuse, we will ask for a refund on our monthly passes (which are priced assuming seven-day-a-week service).

What's the Problem?

The Montclair-Boonton line is the only train line in the entire New York metropolitan area that doesn’t run on weekends. N.J. Transit has been very inventive at coming up with new excuses to avoid providing service. It used to be a small but vocal opposition in Montclair. When that died down, N.J. Transit said the hang-up was construction at Newark’s Broad Street Station. When the station was nearly done, N.J. Transit said the trouble was track work in the Hudson River tunnel. Then the problem became bridge construction on Bloomfield Avenue. Initially the bridge prolonged the delay by nine months. Now they’re saying a year because of court action over compensation paid to the adjacent car wash. At this rate, we’ll get weekend service around the same time as regular space flights to Mars.

None of these excuses holds up when you consider a few simple facts.

Weekend service continues on all other train lines, including the Morristown and Gladstone lines. So much for the Broad Street Station excuse.
Some trains already run down the Montclair-Boonton line on the weekends as N.J. Transit repositions equipment in preparation for Monday. Why can’t those trains carry passengers?
If the Hudson River tunnels really have such limited capacity on weekends, why doesn’t N.J. Transit explore creative alternatives such as service into Hoboken with timed transfers at Broad Street or Secaucus to New York–bound trains?
Bridge work is commonly done on other train lines without requiring the cessation of service. If it requires shutting off power to the overhead lines, why not run diesel locomotives?

Clearly N.J. Transit doesn’t see the urgency for weekend service on our line. Maybe they think no one wants it. We need to raise our voices. Our request is simple: start weekend service immediately. No more excuses.

What Can You Do?

We are starting to circulate a petition to let N.J. Transit officials know that you want to be able to have weekend rail service. Look for the NJ-ARP volunteers at the Montclair Farmers’ Market, Glen Ridge Arts Festival, and Bloomfield HarvestFest. Please contact us if you'd like to help; we can send you a PDF of the petition to print out and distribute.
Contact your local elected officials and representatives asking them to push N.J. Transit to do the right thing. Bring up the issue at a local town council meeting.
Send a letter to N.J. Transit’s Executive Director Richard Sarles at N.J. Transit, One Penn Plaza East, Newark, NJ 07105. Regular mail is always more effective than email.
Come to one of our community meetings; we’ll post the information here.
Join NJ-ARP and help us continue the fight for weekend service.

Frequently Asked Questions

Isn’t Montclair the hang-up? Nope. In the past, a small but vocal group of Montclair residents fought even weekday train service, let alone weekend service. They held up the line for years, against the wishes of other towns and of the majority of Montclair residents. When Midtown Direct service started up in 2002, N.J. Transit said it would not offer weekend service “at Montclair’s request.” But times have changed. The town of Montclair, having seen the benefits of train service, now supports weekend service.
What about noise? Many Montclair residents opposed weekend service on account of the noise of train horns. Noise is indeed a problem, but it is not specific to weekend service. Federal horn-blowing regulations apply equally on all days of the week. To obtain an exemption from those regulations, Montclair recently developed a safety plan at grade crossings. As the Township of Montclair itself states, “Montclair’s proposed implementation of a Quiet Zone has nothing to do with weekend service.”
Why can’t people just take the DeCamp bus? Buses do not provide an adequate substitute for weekend train service and riders would be well served by having more options. There is no reason DeCamp could not thrive if trains ran on weekends, since buses provide access to areas unserved by the train and fill in gaps in the train schedule. In addition, DeCamp can work in conjunction with N.J. Transit by delivering people to train stations, thus freeing up residents from having to use their automobiles at all. Unfortunately, in the past DeCamp has put more effort into litigation (which courts have dismissed) than service improvements.
Is there really a need for trains on weekends? Trains on other lines are heavily utilized on weekends. DeCamp buses are often standing-room-only on weekends; sometimes the bus is full and some unlucky souls have to wait an hour at Port Authority for the next one. Hundreds of students at Montclair State live by the train station and have begged for weekend service.
Would weekend service increase the cost of monthly passes? The price of monthly tickets is set not by the frequency of service but by distance according to a zone system. For instance, most of Montclair lies in zone 5, the same as South Orange or Elizabeth, where the trains run seven days a week. In effect, Montclair-Boonton monthly pass holders are already paying for weekend service that they do not receive.

These files were created by George Musser.