The first statewide transit strike in New Jersey in more than 40 years began just after midnight Friday when about 450 unionized locomotive engineers walked off their jobs in a dispute over pay.
The walkout by members of the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers and Trainmen shut down New Jersey Transit’s rail network. The strike will leave tens of thousands of commuters scrambling for other ways to reach their jobs in the New York City metropolitan region.
The union said its members will start picketing at 4 a.m. on Friday.
Mark Wallace, the union’s national president, said: “They have money for penthouse views and pet projects, just not for their frontline workers. Enough is enough. We will stay out until our members receive the fair pay that they deserve.”
Kris Kolluri, the chief executive of NJ Transit, said at a news conference late Thursday, that he would return to the bargaining table at any time. “This is not a lost cause,” he said. “This is an eminently achievable deal.”
Gov. Philip D. Murphy said the agency’s offer to the union “would have given their members almost exactly what they asked for.”
About 70,000 commuters ride the agency’s trains to Pennsylvania Station in Manhattan on a typical weekday. Many thousands more ride trains to stations in Newark and Hoboken, where they transfer to other trains, buses or ferries.
NJ Transit’s statewide bus system continued to operate as scheduled, and the agency hired private buses to substitute for its train service. But Mr. Kolluri warned that the chartered buses could accommodate only about 20 percent of the displaced train riders. Those chartered buses do not start until next week.
They will run from four Park & Ride lots around the state: Secaucus Junction; PNC Bank Arts Center in Holmdel; Hamilton Rail Station; and Woodbridge Center Mall.
Commuters who already have NJ Transit rail tickets and passes to or from New York, Newark or Hoboken may use those tickets on the Park & Ride service. They will also be cross-honored on NJ Transit buses and light rail lines, but not on other carriers, including Amtrak, PATH ferries and private carrier buses.
Mr. Kolluri urged rail commuters whose presence in their workplaces was not essential to work from home during the strike. Some big employers in New York, like Citigroup and Goldman Sachs, tried to ease the expected jams by giving their workers temporary permission to work remotely or saying they would consider providing some flexibility.
The Partnership for New York City, which represents large employers, estimated that each hour that New Jersey’s commuters were delayed in getting to work would reduce overall productivity in the city by $6 million.
Transportation experts said the impact of the rail shutdown would ripple across other transit systems and add to congestion on the roads in New Jersey. Amtrak’s Northeast Corridor runs up the spine of New Jersey, providing an alternative for some commuters, but its trains are more expensive than NJ Transit’s and are often booked up in advance.
“Even with a contingency plan in place, this is going to be incredibly disruptive to the region,” said Zoe Baldwin, vice president for state programs at the Regional Plan Association. “No matter what mode you’re on, you’re going to have a more difficult commute than usual.”
The strike, the first by transit workers in the state since 1983, came after many months of fruitless negotiations and federal interventions. The National Mediation Board called representatives of the two sides to Washington on Monday in an attempt to reduce tensions.
That was the third try in Washington to broker an accord. Former President Joseph R. Biden Jr. called a Presidential Emergency Board last June to mediate the dispute. That panel recommended contract terms closer to what NJ Transit was offering than what the engineers demanded.
A second Presidential Emergency Board then tried to tackle the matter. In January, it too sided with NJ Transit’s offer as more reasonable than the union’s demands.
Mr. Kolluri took the reins of the agency in January at the behest of Mr. Murphy, New Jersey’s second-term governor, and made settling with the engineers’ union a priority. In March, he shook hands with a union official on an agreement that appeared to resolve the longstanding impasse. But in mid-April, the union’s members overwhelmingly rejected that tentative contract.
The engineers demanded to be paid on par with their counterparts who drive trains for Amtrak and the other commuter railroads in the region — the Long Island Rail Road and Metro-North Railroad. Mr. Kolluri has refused to agree to such a big increase, saying that it would raise the average annual pay of the engineers to $172,000 from $135,000, and could force the agency to raise fares by 17 percent or more.
Thomas Haas, the general chairman of the engineers’ union, contended that those figures were inflated. He said that his members earned about $10 an hour less than their peers.
The engineers’ union was the only one of the 15 unions representing New Jersey Transit employees that had not negotiated a deal with the agency in recent years.
After the engineers rejected the terms of the tentative agreement in April, Mr. Kolluri returned to the bargaining table with union officials. But he presented the same offer that had just been rejected, angering the engineers.
Mr. Haas said that Mr. Kolluri did not want to work out a deal. Mr. Kolluri, in turn, said he wondered about Mr. Haas’s mental health.
All the while, Mr. Murphy, who had promised to “fix” NJ Transit, was monitoring the proceedings from a distance.
The governor said on Wednesday night that he had been “talking literally constantly” with Mr. Kolluri. Mr. Murphy said the two sides had made “enormous progress,” and he hoped that each would walk away with an agreement that provided “a piece of what they wanted and maybe a piece of, you know, that they didn’t get.”
On Thursday, a spokesman for the engineers’ union said if a deal was not reached, its members would start picketing at 4 a.m. Friday at Penn Station in New York, at NJ Transit’s headquarters in Newark and at the train station in Atlantic City.
A prolonged strike would have repercussions beyond complicating commutes. Many air travelers rely on NJ Transit trains to get to Newark Liberty Airport. The agency also shuttles fans to concerts and sporting events at the Prudential Center in Newark and MetLife Stadium in East Rutherford, N.J.
The agency had already canceled train and bus service to MetLife for Shakira’s concerts on Thursday and Friday nights. Beyoncé fans were already worrying about how they would get to her five shows at MetLife over the next two weeks.
Uber warned customers that it expected “significantly higher demand for Uber rides across New Jersey, especially during large-scale events that will take place at MetLife Stadium” and that they should prepare for longer wait times and higher prices than usual.
Matthew Haag contributed reporting.
Patrick McGeehan is a Times reporter who covers the economy of New York City and its airports and other transportation hubs.
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