2006: The Start of Service for a Light Rail System in New Jersey

July 17, 2006

A light rail system serving Newark, New Jersey, and surrounding communities was inaugurated. The Newark Light Rail (NLR) is owned and operated by NJ Transit Bus Operations, a division of the state-owned New Jersey Transit Corporation. NLR was developed from a combination of Newark City Subway, which had been launched in 1935, and an extension of that subway line to Newark Broad Street Station on the northern edge of the city’s central business district.

The southern terminus of NLR is Newark Penn Station, while the northern termini are both Newark Broad Street Station and – in the township and Newark suburb of Bloomfield – the Grove Street Station.

One of the train passengers interviewed by reporter Barry Carter of the Newark-based Star-Ledger at the time of NLR’s opening was Gita Sheth, a resident of the township of West Orange. This township is located about six miles (9.7 kilometers) west of Newark Broad Street Station, and Sheth had found the numerous bus stops between that station and her workplace near Newark Penn Station to be highly challenging and time-consuming. With NLR providing a direct link between those stations, Sheth had a newfound reason to be grateful. “This provides me an option that wasn’t there before,” she remarked in her interview.  

Carter cited as well other assessments of the light rail system and its potential benefits. He reported, “Local, state and federal officials also see the connector as a catalyst for economic development, and a way to make the state’s largest city more accessible to business, educational and entertainment venues.”

NLR serves a total of 17 stations and covers 6.2 miles (10 kilometers) altogether. The accompanying photo of an NLR train crossing Broad Street was taken two days after the system began operations.

Photo Credit: Adam E. Moreira (https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:AEMoreira042281) – licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license at https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/deed.en

A list of light rail systems in the United States is available at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Light_rail_in_the_United_States