Well today I went on another New Jersey adventure to keep adding to my collection of stations and am now almost complete with the Bergen County Line except for the Ramseys!
Taking the bus into Jersey from the GWB Bus terminal is my go to when I am in the mood for some station photography and a lot of walking. There is something very nice about just hopping on a bus for awhile and ending up at some unknown railroad station for me, not taking the subway at all to get there. I think though I am now down to just one left for bus connections I haven’t visited.
As I have mentioned before I am appalled at the price difference between boarding a bus at the GWB Bus Station ($6.50 for this trip) and walking over the bridge to Fort Lee ($3.50), so I decided to start my day with a two mile walk. The fare just across the bridge is only $1.70 so I might just transfer there to save over a $1 if I don’t feel like walking. I got over there and took the 11:15 bus (I was having a slow morning) for a long ride (got a decent nap in) to Ridgewood, a station where they have done an excellent job of installing ADA high-level platforms but not ruining the historical integrity of the mission revival depot. I then started walking north to one of my favorite station names Ho-Ho-Kus, an extremely scenic stop built into the side of a hill. I kept walking up to Waldwick where a locomotive engineer leaned himself way out of the window as I photographed a northbound terminating train stopped in the station and kept giving me the thumbs-up. I than continued walking to Allendale (not to be confused with Annadale on the Raritan Valley Line). There I bought a $4 ticket (noticing signs saying effective March 1, 2012 every NJT station now has a TVM, quite impressive) and took the 3:17pm train south to Plauderville.
I got off at Plauderville and looked at the schedule assuming there was a southbound train the following hour and to my astonishment there wasn’t one from Plauderville until 5:57pm and that the train I had just stopped off of was the last of the day to stop at Garfield! I walked down to Garfield and found one of the most simple and dilapidated NJT stations (with a TVM!) I have ever visited, maybe one car can platform. Laking a Bergen County Line train I almost took the bus but ended with a quite interesting walk by the main yard used by the New York & Greenwood Lake Railroad, a tiny short line that even has a nice looking business passenger car. I kept walking to Passaic’s Station located quite far out of downtown which receives reverse peak rush hour service every half hour. I bought a ticket to Penn Station (would have gone via Hoboken but the fare to Penn from this station was only $1.50 more $6.50/$4.75 and I generally keep a policy with myself to just go with the cheeper option, PATH is $2).
I took the 5:42 train from Passaic to Secaucus and walked up stairs making a point of entering to be at the western end of the platform, getting a photo of my connecting MultiLevel train entering in pull mode, and walked to the A train. Before I got on, in the lower-level entrance to the A’s express platform, I was stunned to see not the usual cops (there were some around) but two blue shirted TSA employees with a portable explosive detector machine, but no one seemed to have been stopped.