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Photo courtesy of passenger Albert Papp Jr.

(Courtesy Albert Papp. Jr.)

Duct tape covered cracks in the mirror of the men’s bathroom at New York Penn Station. One of the soap dispensers was missing, and the water didn’t flow at the wash basins.

The women’s lavatory was no better, as duct tape held up the toilet paper dispenser this week, and it was pot luck trying to find a faucet that worked.

The problems were first brought to the attention of NJ Transit administrators last month by Albert Papp Jr, president of the New Jersey Association of Railroad Passengers.

NJ Transit Executive Director Jim Weinstein and state Transportation Commissioner Jim Simpson were red-faced — with both anger and embarrassment — to learn from Papp Thursday that the same problems persisted this week.

“It’s embarrassing that we have to have a constituent come back a month later, and we can’t seem to fix the toilet paper or the bathroom,” said Simpson, who chairs the NJ Transit board of directors. “And if we can’t do that, there’s no hope for the rest of the system.”

“I apologize, we’re embarrassed and Mr. Papp will not have to make this speech again,” Weinstein vowed Thursday during the monthly meeting of NJ Transit’s board of directors.

Photo courtesy of passenger Albert Papp Jr.

Amtrak owns the Midtown Manhattan train station — the busiest in America — but the bathrooms Papp and his family visited on Wednesday were in NJ Transit’s concourse and are the responsibility of New Jersey’s statewide transportation agency.

After he was told NJ Transit uses a “third party” to maintain the bathrooms, Simpson replied, “Well, fire the third party. Tell the third party if this happens again — can them and find somebody else.”

“This management team here is really good — I’m sure the message got out and somebody dropped the ball,” he added. “But still, that doesn’t relieve us of the obligations. Somebody from Transit management should have been there to take a look at it beforehand and somebody should have been there afterwards to see — before we had this board meeting — that it was fixed.”

Papp’s family found that when it came to the men’s and women’s bathrooms, they were equal opportunity offenders.

“The tissue dispenser in one of the female stalls was held up by duct tape,” Albert Papp said. “We decided to memorialize that in film.”

Last month, NJ Transit announced that it has teamed with Cablevision to offer wireless internet access on the trains.

“While you can go ahead and put Wi-Fi in the trains for the thumb people, it would help if some of the basic necessities of the human individual are attended to,” Papp said.

He added that the condition of the restrooms in New York Penn Station “give new meaning to the NJ Transit motto, ‘The Way to Go.’”

Told that NJ Transit has a person responsible for maintenance of the concourse, passenger Sheila Long said, “I think he’s in Dunkin’ Donuts.”