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New Jersey is the state of constant movement. It is where people identify hometowns by exit number. Where the scenery looks odd if not seen through smudged train windows. Where the meals in its celebrated diners are served with the check as if to say, “Eat up and get out.”
Well, you might want to linger in that diner a while, maybe have a cup of joe and a slice of blueberry pie, because, bub, you ain’t going nowhere fast. New Jersey has become an 8,700-square-mile rest stop. Trains aren’t running, many planes are delayed or canceled and a stretch of highway is closed because of sinkholes that — who knows? — might lead to a better kind of hell.
For residents of the Garden State, who normally move around so much they don’t even notice the garden growing, the situation feels unnatural. It is an anti-Jersey. A Jersey stuck between stations.
The latest and perhaps most devastating blow to the state’s sense of its ever-mobile self came just after midnight on Friday, when about 450 unionized locomotive engineers went on strike for better pay.
The job action shut down the entirety of New Jersey Transit’s rail service, from the foothills of the Shawangunk Mountains in New York to the seaside city of Cape May at New Jersey’s southernmost tip — including, most notably, trains into and out of Pennsylvania Station in Manhattan.
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English (US)