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All Aboard: Secaucus rail depot is ready (The following article by Robert Hanley was posted on the New York Times website on September 4.) SECAUCUS, N.J., -- About 40 years after transportation officials first toyed with the notion of a new rail depot here, New Jersey Transit plans to open a handsome $600 million station on Saturday, built to allow thousands of passengers quicker and simpler train trips to and from Midtown Manhattan. For the next few weeks, the three-level station, known as the Secaucus Transfer, will operate only on weekends. Officials plan to begin weekday operations for rail commuters by the end of the year, once the PATH station destroyed in the attack on the World Trade Center reopens. Long the dream of New Jersey rail officials and commuters, the new station will trim 15 to 20 minutes from the daily train trip for thousands of commuters from Bergen and Passaic Counties in New Jersey and Rockland and Orange Counties in southern New York, said Rob Edwards, senior program manager for New Jersey Transit. Passengers who use the Bergen, Main and Port Jervis lines will be able to transfer at Secaucus to other New Jersey Transit trains ? principally the Northeast Corridor line and the North Jersey Coast Line ? that travel directly to Pennsylvania Station. Currently, those three lines go to Hoboken, where passengers transfer to PATH trains that travel along the West Side of Manhattan between Christopher and West 33rd Streets. The Pascack Valley line, which also ends at Hoboken, has no weekend service, and its passengers will have to wait to use the new station until weekday service begins. The loss of the PATH line in Lower Manhattan on 9/11 forced many passengers to switch to Northeast Corridor and North Jersey Coast Line trains to reach Penn Station, leaving them overcrowded on weekdays. Until the damaged PATH line reopens, there is not enough room on those trains to accommodate additional weekday commuters, Mr. Edwards said. For now, New Jersey Transit officials said, weekend tickets for riders who use the new station to get to and from Penn Station will cost the same as a ticket to Hoboken. On a broader scale, Mr. Edwards said, the Secaucus Transfer will bring the greatest measure of unity yet to a once-fragmented system of 11 lines that New Jersey Transit took over some 20 years ago from bankrupt, privately owned commuter rail companies. Once full weekday service starts, the station will allow rail passengers to make direct connections to 10 of New Jersey Transit's lines, or all except the line that runs between Philadelphia and Atlantic City, Mr. Edwards said. The weekend scheduling provides links to many of the 10 lines. Although some state officials talked about building a station here in the early 1960's, the existence of competitive, privately owned rail lines blocked any serious work on the idea, Mr. Edwards said. Engineering work started in 1989 and actual construction started in 1995. Loss of the PATH line two years ago delayed the opening by a year, he said. Of the project's $600 million cost, the largest expenses were $300 million for four new sets of tracks near the station and $160 million for the station itself, Mr. Edwards said. The federal government provided about $450 million for the project, he said. Mr. Edwards said New Jersey Transit considers the 312,000-square-foot building a state-of-the-art rail terminal. The station has 31 escalators, 11 elevators and 36 stairways connecting its three levels. Announcements will be carried over 2,000 speakers. Information on each train line that uses the station will be color-coded and posted on overhead boards every 100 feet on platforms. Brown and beige tones dominate the interior and exterior color schemes, in keeping with the station's location ? south of Route 3 off New County Road ? at the edge of a marsh. The centerpiece is an eight-sided rotunda of polished granite on the third level. It is open and airy with windows on all eight sides and a skylight about 70 feet above the floor. A 30-foot silvery sculpture of a cattail sits in the middle of the rotunda. Friday, September 05, 2003 © 1997-2010 Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers and Trainmen

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