By Walter Elliott
EAST ORANGE – A group of tri-town residents had been pressing municipal level officials and New Jersey Transit on reopening Ampere Station on what is now the Montclair-Boonton Commuter Rail Line.
Representatives of the Ampere Alliance had been making each of Bloomfield’s three ward meetings, especially in the Third Ward, to drum up support to bring service back to East Orange’s part of Ampere last spring. They have also talked with Bloomfield’s mayor, Michael Venezia.
Ampere Alliance members- who represent residents and commuters within East Orange’s Fifth Ward plus Bloomfield’s Ampere section and Newark’s Roseville neighborhood – have come with an endorsement from the Lackawanna Coalition. The Millburn-based advocacy group, who has been the MBL and Morris & Essex Line watchdog since 1979, endorsed the alliance’s cause at their February monthly meeting.
Its members had pressed to make Ampere Station’s reopening case during May 17’s Essex2045 virtual open house. Essex2045 set various transportation goals for state, county and local officials to meet in the next 23 years.
The alliance has thanked East Orange Fifth Ward City Council candidate Royston Allman for including the station’s reopening on his campaign platform.
Allman, who also advocated reopening the East Orange Public Library’s Ampere Branch, finished second to Team Green and Essex County Democratic Committee-endorsed Naiima Fauntleroy in June 6’s party primary. Reopening Ampere Station has periodically come up in Fifth Ward council campaigns the last 31 years.
NJTransit has all but erased Ampere Station.
Citing only 51 daily riders among 28 daily trains, NJT ended service here April 7, 1991 – the same day they stopped serving East Orange’s Grove Street Station on the M&E. Its contractors demolished the 1920-built station, leaving behind its raised embankment and empty stairwells.
The then-Montclair Branch service had dwindled since the 1960s to weekday rush-hour service. But that was before the statewide transit carrier joined the branch onto the former Boonton Line to make the MBL Sept. 20-22, 2002.
The renamed MBL has since enjoyed an average 11 percent daily ridership increase on its remaining stations.
Weekday off peak service between New York Penn Station/Hoboken Terminal and Montclair State University and weekend runs out to Montclair’s Bay Street Station soon returned. Bloomfield Station’s eastbound waiting room was restored with a $1 million federal grant.
Real estate property values – thanks to NJTransit’s 2002 Montclair Connection and 1993 Midtown Direct service to N.Y. Penn Station- also enjoyed 11 percent average increases. While East Orange saw those increases around its M&E Brick Church and East Orange stations, Ampere remains closed.
The city presented a restoration study to NJTransit and NJDOT in 2005. A more modest station – but with high-level train platforms and more Americans with Disabilities Act-based amenities – was envisioned.
Station and neighborhood history also serve as its positives.
The Crocker-Wheeler/Worthington electric device plant, the Ward Bakery Company and apartment building construction helped Ampere receive 60 daily stops by Lackawanna Railroad trains in 1912. The four-mile Montclair Branch, with its six stops from Newark’s Roseville Junction to Montclair Terminal, was the nation’s busiest commuter rail line into the 1940s.
That Ward bread plant, some 15 years ago, was made into the Bakery Village apartment building and day care center.
The 2005 City of East Orange restoration study, however, would add 80 seconds to an MBL train’s trip time, based on 30 seconds dwell time to pick up or discharge passengers here. The extended trip time may play into NJTransit’s argument against Ampere restoration.
NJTransit has been told by Amtrak – which owns the Northeast Corridor and N.Y. Penn Station – that there is not enough time allowance for train arrivals and departures at NYPS. This was the rationale made by an NJT representative at a 2018 Orange public meeting why more service for that city’s M&E Highland Avenue station will not immediately happen.
The city may also be facing a chicken-or-egg question: Should it pursue reopening the station before seeking a prospective Ampere Transit Village Zone designation before NJTransit and NJDOT – or ask for both at once?
East Orange has had a TVZ designation that covers half-mile radiuses of both its East Orange and Brick Church M&E stations.
The designations allow the municipalities to set special zoning regulations to make the areas more transit rider and walker friendly. NJDOT and NJTransit also offer funding incentives and tax credits for developers who build “transit-friendly” residential, commercial and/or mixed-use structures.
The Shop-Rite anchored Crossings at Brick Church, now under construction, is one example of transit-oriented redevelopment. A commercial-residential building that is replacing the former Central Diner, at 424 Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Boulevard in the Brick Church-East Orange TVZ overlap area, is also underway. The city has been finishing a “Lower Main Street” streetscape remodeling from the King Boulevard/Burnet Street intersection east into East Orange Station and City Hall Plaza.
Orange has a single TVZ that includes its Orange and Highland Avenue M&E stations. The city has eight under-construction or proposed mixed-use buildings within a half-mile of either station or both stations.
Highland Avenue’s radius enters West Orange – whose township officials have been supporting transit oriented development and otherwise support Orange’s zone.
East Orange, should it consider getting an Ampere TVZ, may likewise call on Newark and Bloomfield for support. Parts of Newark’s Roseville and Bloomfield’s Ampere sections fall within the half-mile radius of Ampere Plaza and the station site.
Bloomfield Mayor Venezia, returning to the NYPS time slot access question, told “Local Talk” at a June 3 “Meet the Candidates” event in the Orange Valley that he hopes more slots will open up once Amtrak’s Gateway Project is completed. (Venezia is running for 34th District State Assembly in Nov. 8’s General Election.)
Northeast Corridor and NYPS-bound M&E and MBL riders, on one hand, are seeing foundations being set for a new West Portal Bridge over the Hackensack River as part of the Gateway Project.
The main part of the project, however, involves building two new Hudson River tunnels and then repairing the current pair of 123-year-old tunnels. That work, barring any disaster to the Pennsylvania Railroad-built tunnels, is to be done during most of the 2020s.
