New Jersey is the state of constant movement. It is where people identify hometowns by exit number. Where the scenery looks odd if not seen through smudged train windows. Where the meals in its celebrated diners are served with the check as if to say, “Eat up and get out.”
Well, you might want to linger in that diner a while, maybe have a cup of joe and a slice of blueberry pie, because, bub, you ain’t going nowhere fast. New Jersey has become an 8,700-square-mile rest stop. Trains aren’t running, many planes are delayed or canceled and a stretch of highway is closed because of sinkholes that — who knows? — might lead to a better kind of hell.
For residents of the Garden State, who normally move around so much they don’t even notice the garden growing, the situation feels unnatural. It is an anti-Jersey. A Jersey stuck between stations.
The latest and perhaps most devastating blow to the state’s sense of its ever-mobile self came just after midnight on Friday, when about 450 unionized locomotive engineers went on strike for better pay.
The job action shut down the entirety of New Jersey Transit’s rail service, from the foothills of the Shawangunk Mountains in New York to the seaside city of Cape May at New Jersey’s southernmost tip — including, most notably, trains into and out of Pennsylvania Station in Manhattan.
“It’s terrible. It’s terr-i-ble,” said Cheryll Smalls, 70, a retiree from East Orange, whose planned journeys to locations near and far had been turned upside down by transportation chaos.
“You can’t get no damn where,” she said, while fuming at Newark’s Penn Station. “And once you get out, you feel you can’t get back in.”
The Book of Exodus details the 10 plagues that God inflicted upon the Egyptian pharaoh and his people, including swarms of locusts, an infestation of frogs and an outbreak of boils. But lately it seems that ancient Egypt has nothing on modern New Jersey. Consider this the Plague of Planes, Trains and Automobiles.
It began in subterranean fashion in the Morris County town of Wharton in late December: A 40-foot by 40-foot sinkhole opened up on the eastbound right shoulder of Interstate 80, which runs all the way to California. The hole conjured nightmares of cars and trucks inadvertently taking an off-ramp straight down.
Over the next three months, the state’s Department of Transportation grappled with three more sinkholes on the same stretch of interstate, including ones in the eastbound and westbound lanes. Why the sudden infestation? It appears to have something to do with this area’s rich history of iron mining; beneath the macadam, apparently, abandoned tunnels and mine shafts yawn.
Transportation officials say that heavy rains in the past two weeks — hailstorms were also one of the biblical plagues — have delayed repair work. Two westbound lanes are scheduled to open by the end of May, but all lanes will not be open until late June. For now, traffic in both directions is being rerouted from the compromised highway and directly into delays, causing motorists to spend more time than they might have expected in the state’s scenic Highlands.
Then there is the airport.
For more than a month now, one of the three runways at Newark Liberty International has been closed for construction, causing dominoes of delays that peak during the evening. On top of that, there have been nerve-rattling technology outages. And, on top of that, the airport has an unsettling shortage of certified air traffic controllers.
How bad is it? On Monday, inadequate staffing left the Federal Aviation Administration with no choice but to forbid Newark-bound planes from taking off at other airports for several hours. At one point, only three controllers — nearly a dozen fewer than the desired amount — were working at the highly stressful job.
And, finally, there is New Jersey Transit, the metropolitan area’s railroad Job.
Everyday train customers in New Jersey are a hardened breed, all too familiar with soul-crushing commutes that leave them questioning basic life choices. They have received the text alerts that seem written in indecipherable code. They have sat for eternities while the Portal Bridge over the Hackensack River, stuck in the open position, gets unstuck. Sometimes, sledgehammers are involved.
In fitful dreams, they hear the muffled recording that New Jersey Transit apologizes for the inconvenience.
The subject is sensitive. New Jersey Transit, which has been underfunded for decades, says it has made improvements. There have been fewer cancellations and better on-time performance, a particular challenge given that Amtrak trains along the northeast corridor have primacy. Still, only last year Gov. Philip D. Murphy offered free train rides for a week after what he called, with some understatement, “a really ugly summer” of service suspensions and delays.
Now, with the strike by the locomotive engineers — the first for New Jersey Transit since 1983 — it threatens to become a really ugly spring.
Those who rise early to work felt the impact immediately: Mary Umana, 63, fretting at the quiet train station in Elizabeth about how to get to her job as a house cleaner in Brooklyn; Leslie Bell, 34, unable to pay $110 for an Amtrak ticket that would take him from Trenton to Newark, where he is a supervisor at a Wawa; Lawrence Dydzuhn, 60, waiting for a bus to begin what would now be a long journey from Elizabeth to Midtown Manhattan, where he works as a handyman.
But Dujuan Smalls, 45, the son of the irate Ms. Smalls and a former Marine who works in building maintenance, said that surmounting strange obstacles, both natural and human-made, is part of what it meant to be from New Jersey.
“If you Jersey, you Jersey,” Mr. Smalls said.
This means being unsurprised by an alert issued on Friday saying that anyone who visited Terminal B at Newark Airport on Monday afternoon might have been exposed to measles.
It means being mildly amused by a New Jersey Transit message sent in the midst of the strike that an elevator at the now-deserted Newark Broad Street station had been returned to service “effective immediately.”
And it means seeing a “Rail Service Suspended” sign taped to a window of the locked Maplewood train station, noticing its huge exclamation point — and thinking of all the colorful words that New Jerseyans might put before such emphatic punctuation.
Nate Schweber and Tammy LaGorce contributed reporting.
Dan Barry is a longtime reporter and columnist, having written both the “This Land” and “About New York” columns. The author of several books, he writes on myriad topics, including New York City, sports, culture and the nation.
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