From one side of the platform, the view of NJ Transit is somewhat rosy.

Gov. Phil Murphy says the agency’s trains are running better since he took office. NJ Transit touts a 31 percent reduction in train cancellations since last year.

But that doesn’t quite add up for their riders.

“I have taken this train for about five years now and over the last two years, the cancelations seem to be worse than ever,” said Nicky Giovine, who rides the North Jersey Coast Line from Middletown.

His experience is reflected in the data, and is at odds with what NJ Transit tells customers.

Since January, NJ Advance Media has tracked and analyzed every alert sent to customers through the agency’s eight automated Twitter feeds. The alerts are identical to those sent out through NJ Transit’s website and app.

The analysis shows NJ Transit sent 1,642 alerts about cancelled trains from January 1 to July 1, more than twice the rate than during the spring of 2017, when a pair of high-profile derailments wreaked havoc on the system, the prelude to the so-called “Summer of Hell.”

That’s also more than twice as many as the Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s two commuter railroads — the Long Island Rail Road, the nation’s largest, and Metro North — during the same span.

“It’s just a daily stress on everyone who takes the train, on top of their everyday stresses,” Giovine said. “You just never know if your train will come.”

It’s also gotten markedly worse in recent weeks.

The alert data shows NJ Transit sent alerts about canceling approximately 50 trains a week through the week ending on May 18. Since then, it’s averaged more than 100.

And there’s no sign of improvement anytime soon.

On a sweltering evening on June 28 at Penn Station, when the 5:39 p.m. Morris & Essex train was canceled, a swarm of commuters sprinted to find a train car with enough space to squeeze into. That includes the vestibules at the end of rail cars where passengers typically aren’t supposed to ride.

One man wetted his forehead with bottled water to ease the heat. He and others stood in the space of a walk-in closet. Their reward was a breeze, once the train got in the Hudson River tunnels and gained speed.

Inside the train, Erin Trindell of Summit, was standing and said she was “very angry” because cancelations seem to happen constantly.

“It’s ridiculous, three trains were canceled in two weeks,” she said.

In June, 373 trains were canceled, according to NJ Transit. Our analysis showed June was by far the worst month of the year.

The transit agency disputes NJ Advance Media’s statistics, arguing tracking alerts was unscientific and provided data showing 987 cancellations from January to May, compared to more than 1,100 surfaced through customer alerts during that time.

NJ Transit officials said their numbers are based on rail operations statistics and they frequently bring trains back online after cancelling them, leading the alert numbers to be inflated. However, the NJ Advance Media analysis used official alerts relied on by customers to plan their commutes and accounted for the restored trains — 100 in total — in the data.

NJ Transit’s figure is still more than the trains canceled by the LIRR and Metro North for the same time period. The Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s transparency website lists 753 cancelled or partially cancelled trains from Jan. 1 to July 1, about half of what NJ Transit’s alerts show, despite being a larger rail service. The two railroads had a combined 15.21 million riders in April, twice as many as NJ Transit’s 7.35 million, according to each agency’s statistics.

The governor’s office, however, touted a 47% drop in canceled trains from January to March 2019 compared to the same period in 2018 and said that was a more appropriate comparison than looking at LIRR and Metro North’s performance. The 2018 statistics, however, include more than 800 trains cancelled in March, largely due to winter storms.

Why all the cancellations?

The chief reasons for the spate of recent cancellations are fairly simple: NJ Transit often hasn’t had the engineers to run the trains, or even the trains to run.

NJ Transit says it is working to address the engineer shortage by training a class of 100 new workers scheduled to graduate this October. Meanwhile, the agency counts on engineers to work overtime shifts and on days off.

Some engineers are starting to balk at giving up their relief days, the equivalent of a weekend, to protest a contract issue, resulting in more canceled trains.

Among the causes for canceled trains in June that NJ Transit officials said were out of their control were three Amtrak incidents, including a Penn Station New York signal problem, power problems, a tunnel fire and a person hit by a train which forced service to be suspended, New Jersey Transit spokeswoman Nancy Snyder said.

Murphy, the state’s governor, has said the engineer shortage, which has plagued the agency since 2017, should end when enough spare engineers are on staff to cover vacations, sick days and absences.

Officials say the engineer shortage was caused by a lack of funding for training classes that would have kept pace with engineer retirements and attrition in the early part of the decade. Years of using capital money, intended to fund major purchases of rail cars and locomotive, has to be used to cover holes in the operating budget, the agency says.

The other major reason is equipment availability — it was responsible for 245 cancelations over the five-month period.

NJ Transit is using two types of rail cars that are over or approaching 40 years old. The result is more breakdowns, and trains traveling fewer miles between repairs. Catching up on buying new trains, training new people and upgrading track and other infrastructure will take time, experts say.

“It takes time to improve infrastructure, it’s not instantaneous,” said Dr. Thomas M. Brennan, The College of New Jersey, Associate Civil Engineering Professor. “This is an unfortunate fact and you have to inconvenience people in the process.”

The governor has said he’s working to turn the agency around to “restore it as a national leader in mass transit” but it will take time.

“Governor Murphy inherited an agency that had been hollowed out by the previous administration’s neglect and mismanagement," said Matt Saidel, a spokesman for Murphy. "As the Governor has said, this turnaround will not be achieved overnight, but he looks forward to building on the improvements the agency continues to make.”

What happens when a train gets cancelled

A canceled train has a ripple effect of unpredictability, similar to throwing a bowling ball in a bathtub. Scheduled trains that follow a canceled train are often overcrowded, express trains can be converted to locals, making more stops and prolonging an already agonizing trip. Commuters are standing in aisles and riding in rail car vestibules, because there is no room.

“This one was extra crowded because they canceled the one before it,” said Octavia Mervin who commutes between Dover and New York and was on the 5:49 p.m. train from New York on June 28. “When they (Amtrak) do track work, a lot of trains are canceled…you wait for whatever comes.”

Anic Sharma used two words to describe what canceled trains do to his day.

“Ruin it," he said. "I had a long day, I started my day at 5:30 a.m., I’ll be lucky to get home by 7...It happens once to twice a week.”

The 5:39 is commuter Kim Mulaney’s regular train and when it was cancelled on June 28, she watched NJ Transit’s alerts and took a later train. Mulaney said she uses the same strategy for NJ Transit that she employs to avoid flight delays at Newark Airport.

“The earlier you start your day, the better you are,” she said. “If I have to be at my desk early I’ll take the early train. In 15 years, it is stressful. It is not an easy way to start or end the day. I just want to get to work on time.”

Brad Thomas of Edison can’t drive for medical reasons and relies on NJ Transit to go to work on weekends. He blames the agency’s leadership.

“This is a crisis, their (NJ Transit’s) basic duty is to run trains. If additional money is necessary, then this money should be available,” he said. “I give the engineers credit for running trains on their off days to keep NJ Transit running. They’re the heroes."

Methodology

Since late December, NJ Advance Media has been scraping the data from NJ Transit’s eight customer alert Twitter accounts (one for each rail line) every four hours, parsing it and depositing it into a live public database through the app Workbench. The full methodology of that scrape is displayed there for review and replication. We periodically downloaded this data and built a master database offline, which we used for our overall analysis.

This is not an official count of cancellations or delays, but rather an accounting of the alerts NJ Transit sends to their customers about such issues. The database only counted unique tweets — systemic delays/cancellations affecting multiple lines were not included. NJ Advance Media accounted for, and excluded from analysis, trains that were reported cancelled but later brought back online.

Larry Higgs may be reached at lhiggs@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter @commutinglarry. Find NJ.com on Facebook.

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