Investigation: NJ Transit facing staffing crisis that could mean more delays

Chronic underfunding. A deadly crash. Failed federal safety tests.

Now, NJ Transit, the beleaguered transportation agency that nearly half a million commuters rely upon each day, is facing a staffing crisis so severe that it may take two years to replace train engineers who have left the agency.

That could mean more canceled trains and more delays for commuters.

"It appears they have a hard time training and retaining employees," said Martin Robins, one of the founders of NJ Transit, adding that it is a long-running problem.

NJ Transit has been losing one locomotive engineer a month to New York’s Metro-North railroad since March. Overall, there are 370 active engineers on staff, according to NJ Transit.

A comparison of Metro-North’s most current engineer roster, updated in August, with NJ Transit’s annual engineer roster, released in March, shows a defection of personnel that's accelerated this year. It also shows that dozens of NJ Transit engineers now qualify for retirement or soon will.

A Record and NorthJersey.com investigation has found the agency is confronting problems on many fronts, including fiscal, operational and safety.

Some critics point to mismanagement.

Others blame the Chris Christie administration for not providing enough funding to the nation's third largest transit agency. The shortage of train operators is the latest blow to NJ Transit, which has had a series of setbacks in recent years, including:

Christie, citing potential cost overruns, canceled NJ Transit's highest profile project in years, the construction of a new Hudson River tunnel.

The agency left a large part of its fleet in a low-lying rail yard during Superstorm Sandy, suffering more than $120 million in damage.

Last year, a deadly crash at Hoboken Station exposed how far behind NJ Transit was in installing a federally-mandated safety system that many believe could have prevented the accident.

And while Metro-North, a railroad run by New York's Metropolitan Transportation Authority, has hired nearly 100 engineers since the beginning of 2015, NJ Transit has only hired four in the same period of time.

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There are less than 20 engineers in NJ Transit's training program and the bulk of those won't be qualified to run a train until 2019. Managers who are qualified engineers have been pulled onto the lines to help cover the staffing losses.

The dilemma surfaced publicly over the summer, as trains had to be canceled during an already troubled daily commute created by the track work at New York’s Penn Station.

NJ Transit officials are hopeful that with the summer vacation season ended, there will be enough staffing to cover the shifts. But others warn the agency's lack of investment in personnel will continue to be a drag.

"It has consequences that are not visible," Robins said.

Lopsided pay scales between the MTA and NJ Transit might contribute to the shortage: While NJ Transit’s engineers typically earn $32 an hour, their counterparts at Metro-North make $46 an hour, according to public data.

Another cause may be cultural: NJ Transit's former compliance chief testified to lawmakers in Trenton last month that the railroad retaliates against employees who speak out about problems. NJ Transit denies those charges and is suing the former official who made them.

Neither agency would confirm that Metro-North has been hiring NJ Transit personnel. Metro-North said it does not keep track of where its most recent hires had worked previously.

Nor would the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers & Trainmen, which represents NJ Transit's engineers, or the Association of Commuter Rail Employees, which represents Metro-North engineers.

Christie's office did not return a call seeking comment Friday.

Rosters show a trend

The Record and NorthJersey.com obtained a roster of Metro-North engineers, current as of the beginning of Aug. 8, through a New York Freedom of Information Law request, and compared it with NJ Transit engineer rosters from 2015, 2016 and 2017, available on the union's website.

The comparisons show that the names of six engineers on NJ Transit's roster, current as of March 6, match the names of Metro-North engineers hired between the end of March and the end of July.

Only one additional name on NJ Transit's 2015 and 2016 engineer rosters matches a name on Metro-North's current engineer roster.

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Metro-North has been on a hiring binge over the past couple of years, bringing on 24 new engineers this year; 40 in 2016; and 31 in 2015.

By contrast, NJ Transit's 2017 roster showed that the last four engineers hired were in 2015.

To be sure, NJ Transit has posted its available engineer jobs. But candidates must take part in a 20-month training program, meaning anyone who signs up now won't be qualified to operate a train until 2019. And not everyone who begins the class will finish.

Another challenge could be coming soon: NJ Transit could see a big retirement wave over the next few years.

Engineers are eligible to retire when they reach age 60, with 30 years of service. Though the roster doesn't show the engineers' ages, 53 of them have 30 years of service or will reach that milestone in the next two years. At least 10 of them were first hired in the 1970s.

Even more competition

NJ Transit has other competition for new engineers.

The Southeast Pennsylvania Transportation Authority, which operates commuter rail service in the Philadelphia region, had 18 engineers in training at the beginning of 2017. The agency expected to promote six of them as engineers this year, and 12 next year.

Amtrak's most recent roster shows the railroad has hired 53 locomotive engineers since the beginning of 2015 for the Northeast Corridor between New York and Washington.

Jim Smith, a spokesman for NJ Transit, said the railroad has seven engineer trainees in its current class. Five of them will complete the program in November, and the other two in March. Eleven engineers will graduate from the next class in June 2019, Smith said.

In the interim, Smith said, the railroad has pressed managers who are qualified as engineers into service to keep the trains running. He said an end to the summer track work in Penn Station, the end of summer vacation season and an end to special beach trains would also help ease the engineer shortage.

"Leaving customers waiting for trains on platforms or having customers crowded on a combined train because of crew shortages is unacceptable," Smith said. "There are number of things that will be happening to reduce the potential of trains having to be annulled or combined because of a shortage of engineers."

Locomotive engineers aren't the only ones who have left NJ Transit for Metro-North.

In 2014, longtime NJ Transit rail operations head Kevin O'Connor went across the Hudson River to become Metro-North's chief transportation officer.

In 2015, Ronnie Hakim, who led NJ Transit as executive director for a year and a half, became president of New York City Transit, also part of the MTA.

And Robins, who is also professor emeritus at the Voorhees Transportation Policy Center at Rutgers University, said other valuable middle managers had also left NJ Transit in recent years.

"Metro-North has been the happy recipient of many of those people," Robins said.

Funding stretched thin

A report issued this month by the nonprofit advocacy group The Fund for New Jersey was critical of how the state funds NJ Transit and concluded that a dedicated source of funding, such as from motor vehicle registrations, is needed to keep the agency solvent.

NJ Transit has raised its fares five times since 2000, including a 22 percent increase in 2010, but those fares only cover about half of the agency's $2.1 billion operating expenses.

To make up the bulk of the difference, the agency relies upon federal and state funding.

Fifteen years ago, NJ Transit received $350 million a year from the state's general fund, but by 2015, that amount had dwindled to $33 million.

The agency has also been receiving nearly $300 million a year from the state's Turnpike Authority to help cover its $1.1 billion annual operating deficit. And utility customers are also propping up NJ Transit's operations, in the form of the $82 million a year from the state's Clean Energy Fund.

Public scrutiny

NJ Transit has been under intense public scrutiny since one of its trains crashed through a bumping post at Hoboken Terminal on Sept. 29 of last year, killing one person on the platform and injuring more than 100 others.

The Federal Railroad Administration was investigating NJ Transit's safety record even before the Hoboken crash. Federal regulators flunked the agency in an April 2017 audit of its safety compliance program.

The most recent report NJ Transit filed with federal regulators documenting its progress on positive train control, a mandatory collision avoidance system, showed that the agency is behind on installing the system, though it has said it expects to meet the December 2018 deadline set by Congress for completing the $320 million project.

And late last month, NJ Transit's ousted compliance chief, Todd Barretta, unloaded on the agency in blistering testimony to legislators in Trenton. Last week, NJ Transit sued Barretta, who was fired in August, allegedly for misusing his company vehicle.

During the hearing, Barretta said the agency was "in great peril."

Barretta said the agency is losing so many people to retirement and to other transit agencies, notably Metro-North, that it is in danger of losing the kind of institutional knowledge it needs to operate safely.

At the same hearing, employment attorney Nancy Smith testified that the agency had retaliated against women and minority employees who had made discrimination complaints.

Smith, who won a $5.8 million settlement against NJ Transit in 2012 on behalf of 10 African-American agency police officers, called the agency’s culture “toxic, corrupt, sexist and racist.”

Staff writer Dave Sheingold contributed to this story.