After the sickening thud, Tommy Ferretti stepped off the train to survey the damage. He saw what looked like a toy doll in the snow, wrapped in pink.

"Is that real?" Ferretti, a conductor on the NJ Transit train, asked the train engineer as they walked closer.

"Yeah, I think it’s a baby," the engineer replied.

The infant had been in the arms of her mother, who had just committed suicide by walking into the path of another train on the tracks in Ho-Ho-Kus, Bergen County, on Dec. 12, 2002.

The 6-month-old child was thrown during the impact and, remarkably, had a soft landing in the snow.

"It had a little brush burn on its cheek," Ferretti said. "I’d like to see this kid today. I’d like to tell (her), ‘You’re a miracle.’ "

Even when you have seen as much as Tommy Ferretti has seen over the years, some things just stick with you.

Longtime railroaders at NJ Transit agreed to talk with The Star-Ledger about their most memorable moments, both happy and sad, to commemorate the 30th anniversary of the rail division this month. The workers, who have been in the industry from 30 to 64 years, told stories tinged with terror and tragedy, but also tales of teamwork.

They recalled the three defining events for the railroad during the past 30 years: a 1996 collision between two trains that killed both engineers and a passenger and led to increased safety measures; the attacks of 9/11 and NJ Transit’s role in shepherding passengers home; and the fury of Hurricane Sandy.

Jimmy Kelton, like Ferretti, also wonders all these years later what happened to a child. The morning of Sept. 11, 2001, Kelton, an engineer, let a young boy sound the train horn at Suffern Station on the way to Hoboken, where the boy and his mother were to transfer for a PATH train to her job at the World Trade Center.

Kelton, whose own sister escaped the twin towers, always hoped that the transfer train carrying the little boy and his mother failed to arrive at the World Trade Center before the first plane struck.

Later in the day on 9/11, Kelton ran a local train up to Port Jervis, N.Y. On the way back, he remembers the eerie sight of so many cars still in the train station parking lots late at night. They belonged to the World Trade Center commuters who would never go home again.

"You know those were the people, our customers, that never made it," he said.

The story of NJ Transit began January 1983. Through an act of Congress, states had the option of either taking over the commuter lines from Conrail, or contracting with Amtrak.

NJ Transit and the MTA in New York City and SEPTA in Philadelphia opted to own their railroads.

At first, employees referred to the NJ Transit cars as "circus trains," because of the cars’ mismatched colors from previous railroad lines.

Some were manufactured during the Thomas Edison era, with cane seats. They also had cab cars with windows that opened, nicknamed "Jesse James cars," referring to the outlaw who used the windows to escape.

"We had cars down at Bay Head that you would actually put ice cubes in and the fans would blow onto the ice — and that would be the air conditioning in the old club cars," said Edwin Lawrence, an overhaul foreman and fifth-generation rail worker. A one-way fare from Newark to New York was $1.50, compared with $5 three decades later.

The Transportation Trust Fund in 1983 provided a stable source of funding for NJ Transit, and the agency started investing in equipment, buying Arrow cars, then Comets, then the popular multilevel cars of today. Ridership surged, from an average of 122,300 passenger trips per weekday in 1983, to 291,800 now.

Another big change is the Rail Operations Center in Kearny, the central nervous system of the railroad, where rail traffic managers can control the train signals and switches, and can look at any of five giant screens to plot the whereabouts of every NJ Transit train in the state.

The state-of-the-art center was born in part after a crash at the border of Secaucus and Jersey City between two Bergen Line trains during the morning rush hour on Feb. 9, 1996.

The National Transportation Safety Board found that one of the train engineers failed to see a red signal because of a diabetic eye disease and went through a stop, striking another commuter train.

Joe Meade was a trainmaster at the time for NJ Transit, in charge of conductors and trainmen.

"It’s something you hear about and you train for, but driving down that road and seeing those people — our customers — walking off the train, it was like the French leaving Paris," said Meade, now superintendent of the Hoboken transit division. "They were just walking down the tracks."

Now, "cab signals" and automatic train controls ensure the safe separation and speed of locomotives.

"We’re one of the only railroads in the United States (whose) entire system is on cab signals and automatic train controls," said Kevin O’Connor, NJ Transit’s vice president and general manager of rail operations.

From the Sept. 11 attacks came a new mission for NJ Transit’s police department, said Al Stiehler, the agency’s inspector in charge of internal affairs and the detective bureau.

"That, for the police department, was a defining moment, because it just changed the way that we as a police agency operate," he said. "We went from crime suppression and deterrence to counterterrorism."

Workers at Hoboken Terminal felt the ground shake, like an earthquake, when the first World Trade Center tower toppled.

Evacuees from New York arrived at the ferry terminal in Hoboken. "We were the only show in town," said Meade, whose best friend, a New York City firefighter, was killed that day. "The only way off, if you were on this side of the trade center, was by boat. We had people coming over here from Long Island, from Brooklyn from Queens. They had no clue where they were, or no clue how to get home. What we did is, we figured out how to get them home."

As with 9/11, employees showed up for work after Hurricane Sandy three months ago without prompting and asked what they could do to help. Rail yards in Kearny and Hoboken flooded, causing $100 million in damage to the 261 rail cars and 62 locomotives left behind.

"Everybody just came into the shop," said Keith Warncke, manager of locomotives. Some of the workers at the Meadows Maintenance Complex and Rail Operations Center in Kearny watched their own cars float away in the flooding.

"It was something we had never seen before," said Frank Bookstaver, who at 85 can stake a claim to being oldest train dispatcher in America. "Someone hollered, ‘There’s water coming up the street!’ And in a matter of minutes, I went down just to see what my car was doing, and it (the water) was already climbing up the side of the car. Many tried to move their cars, but it was hopeless."

Bookstaver’s Mercury Grand Marquis was ruined, but he spent four days at the Rail Operations Center, sleeping on an office chair at night.

"That’s the way we railroaders were all brought up," said Lawrence, great-great grandson, grandson, and son of rail men — and now a father himself of rail workers. "Mission first."

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