anyone who caught a train after 7pm wed nite owes me a big fat “thank-you”.

my train sprung two, count em, 2 air leaks while leaving nyp and stopped dead in the middle of the tunnel.

so i got to crawl underneath the train to fix the first leak, get back on, fight through a crowd, and do the same for the 2nd leak.

all in 10 minutes.

not to brag, but alot of other people wouldnt of done what i did.

Yesterday, I rode on the 2:13 M&E at Penn Station NY. The monitors and the track announcement all said track 13. There was no train on track 14. There was one on track 14.

You had to ask the conductors (a bunch of short, fat women) if this was the correct train. Even though they saw all those people standing on the other side of the platform, the made no effort to let then know that track 14 was their train. Also, all of the doors on the middle of the train were closed - you could only enter from the front car or the back car.

From nj.com today -

THE LAND OF THE LOST (AND FOUND)

Sunday, October 22, 2006

BY TOM FEENEY

Star-Ledger Staff

Sometimes the things left behind on NJ Transit trains and buses raise new questions. Sometimes they answer old ones.

Sometimes an item of stagger ing monetary value is left behind. Sometimes an item is left whose real value is apparent to no one but the owner. And sometimes things are left in great unclaimed batches that seem to have no value at all.

More than 850,000 passenger trips are made aboard NJ Transit’s trains, buses and light rail cars every weekday. The people who make those trips are a forgetful bunch. In the first nine months of this year alone, they left in their wake more than 15,000 items that eventually made it into the transit agency’s lost-and-found system.

NJ Transit has taken steps since summer to make it easier for people to be reunited with their treasures. The system used to be scattershot. A person would have to know which of 21 phone numbers to call to ask about a lost item. Every garage and train station had its own set of procedures.

“There was no one central loca tion where people could go to find out what had been found and where they had to go pick it up,” said L. Richard Mariani, NJ Transit’s chief of customer resources.

That changed in July when NJ Transit officials adopted a home- made computer program for tracking lost and found items.

Whenever something turns up now on a train, bus or light rail car, it is entered into a database.

When a commuter reports something missing — either by calling a central NJ Transit phone number or filling out an online form — that information is entered into the database, too.

Every night, a computer in the Transit Information Center in Maplewood compares the list of found items to the list of lost items. Every morning, Mariani said, employees in the TIC look for matches and begin calling commuters whose lost belongings have been found.

Over the years, those treasures have included jewelry and, more re cently, a growing array of expensive electronic devices — laptops, PDAs, Blackberrys, iPods. A guy once left $5,000 in a bag on a bus, Mariani said. A woman once left a briefcase full of legal papers behind on a train during a sensitive time in a corporate merger.

“Someone left a Stradivarius once,” said Mariani, who oversees the lost-and-found operation and is able to offer an inventory of the interesting things that have been turned in over the years. He tells stories about these things discreetly, offering details but withholding names so as to spare his riders embarrassment.

The Stradivarius was left by a professional musician who rode into Manhattan on a Midtown Di rect train, he said. When he disem barked at New York Penn Station, he left behind a centuries-old violin that, in addition to being his livelihood, had a monetary value of tens of thousands of dollars, if not more.

“He was very appreciative when we were able to return it to him,” Mariani said.

Valuable items don’t stay long in lost-and-found. People tend to be serious about finding them, Mariani said.

People also tend to be serious about finding things to which they have emotional attachments.

A Montclair woman once left a pair of red mittens on board a Midtown Direct train. They were old and well-worn, but the NJ Transit customer service agents at Penn Station in New York could tell they meant a lot to her, Mariani said. She told them she had bought them on a trip more than a decade earlier. They were returned to her in less than an hour.

A man who left a coat on a Raritan Valley Line train became a regular visitor this year to the customer service office Newark Penn Station.

“He was coming in here every day asking if we had found it yet,” said Janelle Williams, a customer service supervisor whose office is beside the lost-and-found closet. The man told her the coat meant a lot to him because it had belonged to his late father.

Most of the things the conduc tors, brakemen and bus drivers scoop up at the end of their runs do languish in lost-and-found. Of the 15,000 items collected between January and September, only about 3,500 have been reclaimed.

The rest got stuck in closets, lockers and storage bins at train stations and bus garages all around New Jersey and across the Hudson River in Manhattan.

The kind of items that most often stay lost include eyeglasses, keys, umbrellas, books and clothing. The lost-and-found closet at Newark Penn Station is stuffed with those things.

NJ Transit is required by law to keep found items for at least 120 days. After that, the person who turned them in, whether an NJ Transit employee or not, has a right to claim them for herself, though that rarely happens, Mariani said.

The transit agency has agreements with charities for donating unclaimed cell phones and eyeglasses. It would like to find someone willing to regularly take all of the clothing it collects, Mariani said. In the absence of such a charity, most of the clothing is eventu ally thrown away, as are the um brellas, the keys and most of the other items.

The most interesting things the agency has handled over the years have neither great monetary nor emotional value. They are things with the power to stir the imagination, to raise new questions and answer age-old ones.

Does public transportation play a role in animal husbandry? That’s a new question posed by a lost- and-found item. Apparently the answer is yes.

Some years ago, a package of frozen bull semen was lost on an NJ Transit bus. Actually the semen never even made it onto the bus, said Dennis Martin, who today is the senior director of customer service and transit information for NJ Transit but who was in the mid- 1980s the bus garage supervisor whose job it was to search for the lost semen.

“Someone paid to have that package shipped on a route bus,” Martin said.

The specimen was supposed to go from a Trailways bus in Philadelphia to NJ Transit to a farmer somewhere in New Jersey, but after some frantic searching, Martin learned that the package had never been moved from one bus to the other.

Why don’t the people of South Jersey take better care of their bicycles? That’s another new question raised by the items in lost-and- found.

The buses have racks on the front, and 62 times this summer alone, riders have walked away without claiming their bikes. Nearly all of the bikes were found on buses in South Jersey.

The bikes are reported to police, Mariani said, so they can be compared against theft reports. The ones that aren’t claimed are donated to a charity that fixes them up and ships them to developing countries where they might serve as someone’s chief mode of transportation.

Does anybody really read Playboy magazine just for the articles? That’s an old question, and the publishers have always claimed that there is more to the magazine than cheesecake.

Among the items in the lost- and-found at the Hoboken Terminal is one that supports their claim: a copy of the current issue of the magazine in Braille.

Tom Feeney covers transportation. He may be reached at tfee ney@starledger.com or (973) 392-1790. To report a lost item to NJ Transit, call (800) 772-2222 or fill out a form online at njtransit.com.

Last night (Weds 10/4) on the 6:03 Trenton express. There were a handful of IDIOTS who didn’t realize what train they were getting on (ASK SOMEONE, DIPSHITS!) did NOT stop at Jersey Ave or New Brunswick. So they whined and petition the conductor to make a special stop just for them–successfully!! This is annoying enough as it is–the fact that the whole f’ing train has to slow down because of a few morons, but to make matters worse, after the unscheduled stop, the conductor (or whomever) has the BALLS to get on the PA to apologize for the slow speed because AMTRAK HAD FORCED THEM TO USE THE LOCAL TRACK! Give me a fucking break! If you’re going to be little shits and cave in to every asshole who doesn’t know who to look at a monitor at least own up to it!!!

On a weekend, I was taking a train from Princeton Junction to NYC. As soon as I got on, they announced “New Brunswick will be the next stop, I repeat New Brunswick is next, New Brunswick…” When the ticket collecter comes, he says “New Brunswick is the next stop” as loud as possible. There is a display that says “next station: New Brunswick, please keep feet off seats, don’t go in the vestibule, yadda yadda” Then when the train is about a mile from NB, and I see the big buildings of New Brunswick, the automated voice says “This station stop is New Brunswick” and the conductor then says on the PA system “New Brunswick, this stop is New Brunswick, we are now arriving at New Brunswick.” He does the same thing with every stop, and it is a local train. I know which stop is coming next when I board the train, I don’t need someone to tell me that 10 times. And if someone missed their stop in New Brunswick and wound up in Edison, I would laugh at them.

Thanks to these two daring thieves, a NJT Conductor who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time , will be out of work for an extended period of time with little or no compensation from NJT. This all happened on the train in broad day light. WTF? This is what we have to deal with to try and make a living!

Love the site.

True story. I am a 7 year commuter, with a monthly pass. One day I was running late to get home so my wife could go to a Parents Teacher meeting. A train pulled into Newark and as it was the correct time for an Edison train, I got on. Only after the doors closed, was an announcement made that the train is a New Brunswick train (no Edison for you). The conductor comes by, I ask her what to do. 1st thing she says is to pay the step up fare. I pull out my monthly pass as well as a number of prior monthly’s to Edison (I clean out my little wallet once every couple of months and had not done so in a while), Still she will not let me pass. The 1-2 dollars did not break me, but I was very annoyed that I had a monthly and old monthly’s to Edison, and my car was parked at Edison, yet received exactly zero curtsey or consideration.

I shudder to think of how much I have paid over the last 7 years in commuting and future costs.

Would a little customer relations have hurt?

BTW after she took my money, she told me to get off at New Brunswick, and switch back to the other side and take the train to Edison, which I did. A new conductor who happened to be waiting on the platform with me was considerate when I told him my story. This conductor explained to me that the conductors gets no more $ for collecting fares.

What gives with you guys.

Charlie G.

I sent this to NJTransit. I’ll let you know what they tell me.

I seem to keep revisiting this question and this time, I’d like to hear about the official policy aboard NJ Transit trains. This morning, train service leaving Jersey Avenue - according to njtransit.com - had some minor delays. I arrived at about 7:30 for the 7:36 and noticed the train wasn’t there. I checked njtransit.com and it had said the 7:36 was cancelled. Ok, not so bad. Next train is 7:52 (I think) which is actually my normal train. So I hang out in my car so I can at least listen to the radio. 8:08 a train pulls in. I don’t know if this was the delayed one from before or the 8:12 train. Whatever the case, there’s 40 minutes worth of commuter cattle waiting to board the train. The train was almost full when it left Jersey Ave, the first station. I had figured this was going to be an interesting ride.

Ultimately tickets were not collected by conductors. Now, this has happened in the past and I’ve complained that as a monthly ticket holder (who paid for that trip), I should get a refund because quite frankly, I don’t enjoy subsidizing the cost of the tickets you don’t collect. I’m not even asking for that today. What I’d like to know is what is the official policy on collecting tickets aboard the train when there are delays/overcrowding. This way, once I know this, when it happens again, I’m able to deal with it appropriately.

Here are the scenarios I thought of. If there are anymore, please let me know:

1) Train is delayed xx minutes so we do not collect fares and put our conductors’ lives at stake

2) The train is too over crowded so the conductor can’t fit down the aisle so we will not collect fares

3) We always collect fares no matter if trains are overcrowded or late

My initial feeling is that 3 is true. Can you set me straight on your official policy?

I need your input. As a Trainman, I have to deal with all sorts, but my interest is in how you feel about people who scam rides by using fake monthlys. Last week I busted a very nice and cute young lady using a fake monthly. In fact, she had four months worth of fake monthlys in her possesion. Maybe because she was nice and cute she got away with it for as long as she did; in addition to the fact some Conductors just don’t care, or are not willing to anything about it. How do you feel about people like that, and what should be done to them?

All of my days are starting to blend into each other, but if my mind serves me correctly, this happened yesterday.

I was working on the Main Line so I only overheard bits and pieces of conversations on the radio.

A conductor calls the M&E train dispatcher requesting EMS at Mountain Station for an unconcious passenger. When EMS arrived they declared the man dead, on the train. Was anybody on board that train to tell me about it.

To top it off, at the same time there was another call for EMS in Hoboken Terminal for another man bleeding o death in the men’s room.

If anybody knows anything. Dish it out!!!!