RailNutterNews
Volume I, Issue 9 (1999)

THE PCCs OF NEWARK, NEW JERSEY

All pictures 1997 by RailNutterNews

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Back when I was a boy growing up in suburban Morris County, New Jersey I frequently journeyed via Newark or Hoboken to New York City and beyond, sometimes by bus, but as often as I could by train. A railfan since I was 6 or 7, I also loved any mode of transit that didn’t run on rubber wheels, so subways and streetcars fascinated me as well. On one of my many trips to the Big Apple I was wandering around in Newark’s Penn Station (in the pre Amtrak/New Jersey Transit days) when I spied a sign for the Newark Subway. Intrigued by this concept, I walked downstairs to discover an underground platform serving tracks filled with PCC trolley cars! These were labeled with the logo of the Public Service Corporation, long familiar to Jerseyites as a purveyor of stove gas and electricity, and, in those days, of public transit (via a fleet of buses) as well. I was astonished, having been quite unaware of the fact that there were any other subway lines in the area than those running in New York City! I thought to myself that I must come back someday and “check all this out”. But life intervened, my trips through Newark tapered off, and college, relocation to another state, a couple of career changes, and three decades somehow slipped by me. So it was not until 1997, that, meeting a friend in New York with a similar taste for electric motive power, the idea of actually going over to Newark and riding the system once again surfaced in my life. We settled on a day and sent out a call to our fellow transit fans.
That Newark should have a subway is one of those strange and rare examples in the history of American transit which worked in favor of rails instead of roads. Back in the early nineteenth century, when canals were all the rage for getting goods from one place to another, New Jersey built one which freighted wares from the western part of the state to the shores of the Hudson River. But soon the iron horse proved itself both faster and cheaper, and so the Morris and Essex Railroad, and its successor, the Delaware Lackawanna and Western (home of the great turn of the century Phoebe Snow advertising jingles), caused the Morris Canal to fall into disuse. Meanwhile electricity was starting to put the horses out to pasture and revitalizing traction service in America’s metropolitan centers. To relieve traffic congestion on crowded city streets, Boston put its trolleys underground as early as 1897. But it was not until the 1920s that some brainy soul in Newark suggested that the disused canal bed would make an ideal means of moving “streetcars” swiftly though the busy downtown area to the quieter less traffic thronged suburbs.
Construction was begun in November 1930, with the first service commencing on May 26, 1935. The line was extended to Penn Station in 1937 and to its present terminal on Franklin Avenue in 1940. There are eleven stations, and one can still see the “ramps” (now, alas, trackless) by which no fewer than five branch lines once split off to render trolley service to various Newark neighborhoods. As late as the 1960s, the idea of extending streetcar service to the suburbs of the city was suggested (as well as the darker proposal in the ‘50s of converting the entire line to electric/diesel buses!), but nothing came of it. The subway continues from Penn Station underground for three stops, then emerges into the old canal bed, where it proceeds along this right of way to its loop terminal at Franklin Avenue. There is a single grade crossing at Norfolk Street. Our party seemed the biggest patrons on a quiet Sunday afternoon. The weather was pleasant, and, hidden from the city streets, the ride was curiously peaceful. New Jersey Transit has replaced the Public Service Corporation, but still operates a fleet of thirty PCCs, all built in 1946-47 by the famous St. Louis Car Company. With modern, impersonal, boxy LRVs as the commonest “trolley” to be found in those few North American cities still operating streetcars, these streamlined memorials of the golden days of urban traction were a thrill even to see, let alone to ride!
The Newark Subway is no musty relic of times long past however, but a very vital and much used link in the region’s transit network. It boasts nearly five million passengers a year, and generates revenues of almost three and a half million dollars! These cars travel a total of just under 650,000 miles between January and December and run every day from 4:30 AM to half an hour after midnight. The line itself is a mere 4.3 miles! All cars seat fifty-five people, were completely refurbished in the early 1980s, and have conformable cloth seats, shades of a finer era in mass transit. As is not surprising, there have been a few trades with those cities which still possessed the remains of a PCC fleet, such as Cleveland and Toronto.
From the Orange Street Station to the Franklin loop, the line runs along the edge of Branch Brook Park giving it a pastoral setting most unlike the conventional mental picture of a big city trolley route. At the Franklin Avenue Loop there were great photo opportunities Our group traveled the entire length of the run stopping at midpoint for photos and to watch the cars go sailing through.
The great advantages of a trip such as this are the opportunities it provides for a large variety of rail experiences. For example, at the Orange Street Station we could look over the busy Morristown line of New Jersey Transit’s commuter service, the very tracks of the railroad that had spelled commercial ruin for the canal in whose converted bed we stood. Traveling over from New York City, we saw the tracks of many a railroad, including the crucial Pennsylvania main line which brings Amtrak passenger trains from Boston and New York to Philadelphia and Washington, as well as to such remoter destinations as Pittsburgh, Miami and New Orleans. Highways, seascapes and rails are everywhere, this is the point where all transit routes dash headlong toward the heart of the greatest metropolis in North America.
Both the quickest and the most scenic means of getting to Penn Station, Newark is, happily, by train itself. The PATH (Port Authority Trans Hudson) features modern clean subway service between various points in lower Manhattan and Newark. The PATH line is also of historic importance, as it consists of the first successful set of tunnels under the Hudson River, built by the Hudson and Manhattan Railroad in 1906, and paving the way for the massive double tunnels connecting New Jersey with Long Island which the Pennsylvania RR opened just four years later. These in turn, permitted for the first time, through trains between New England and the nation’s capital.

The writer is a librarian and teacher, who lives in Massachusetts.