New Jersey Transit strike turns part of Penn Station into near ghost town

Day One of the NJ Transit strike has turned part of Penn Station into a near ghost town, empty of thousands of passengers who commute in and out of New York City.

New Jersey Transit train engineers went on strike Friday, leaving an estimated 350,000 commuters in New Jersey and New York City to seek other means to reach their destinations or consider staying home.

Groups of picketers gathered in front of transit headquarters in Newark and at the Hoboken Terminal, carrying signs that said "Locomotive Engineers on Strike" and "NJ Transit: Millions for Penthouse Views Nothing for Train Crews." Passing drivers honked their horns.

The walkout comes after the latest round of negotiations on Thursday didn’t produce an agreement. It is the state’s first transit strike in more than 40 years and comes a month after union members overwhelmingly rejected a labor agreement with management.

On Friday morning, Mike Vaysburd, 32, of Philadelphia, had to detour via Amtrak — on a more crowded train than usual from Trenton, New Jersey, via a fivefold more expensive ticket — to get to his finance job in midtown and was the only passenger arriving in what is typically a bustling transit hall.

"This is wild!" Vaysburd said. "I’ve never seen it this empty."

He learned last week of the looming strike when he went to buy a ticket on the NJ Transit app, where he saw an alert, and last night kept scrolling X, formerly Twitter, to check whether there would indeed be a strike.

"I was hoping it wouldn’t [happen]," he said, "but unfortunately it did."

At least he knew ahead of time, unlike 26-year-old commuter Marco Segovia, of Sunnyside, Queens, who showed up to a nearly totally empty NJ Transit section of Penn Station with his ticket, bound for Elizabeth, New Jersey, where he works as a busser at a club. But there were no trains due to the strike, which he found out from a Newsday reporter.

"How can I go to New Jersey right now?" Segovia asked, adding: "When’s the next train?"

A customer service rep told him he should walk to the Port Authority Bus Terminal, and he soon began the walk uptown, uncertain which bus he’d take or when.

It wasn’t just commuters whom the strike affected.

Digital information signs near the staircases to the tracks said there would be no NJ Transit to Shakira concerts May 15 and 16.

By contrast, Long Island Rail Road passengers arrived and departed seemingly as normal.

NJ Transit — the nation’s third-largest transit system — operates buses and rail in the state, providing nearly 1 million weekday trips, including into New York City. The walkout halts all NJ Transit commuter trains, which provide heavily used public transit routes between New York City’s Penn Station on one side of the Hudson River and communities in northern New Jersey on the other, as well as Newark Liberty International Airport, which has grappled with unrelated delays of its own recently.

The agency had announced contingency plans in recent days, saying it planned to increase bus service, but warned riders that the buses would only add "very limited" capacity to existing New York commuter bus routes in proximity to rail stations and would not start running until Monday. The agency also will contract with private carriers to operate bus service from key regional park-and-ride locations during weekday peak periods.

With AP

By Matthew Chayes

matthew.chayes@newsday.comchayesmatthew

Matthew Chayes, a Newsday reporter since 2007, covers New York City.