1st day of Penn Station repairs: crowds, delays, mostly OK
NEW YORK — For hundreds of thousands of commuters heading into New York on Monday, the first day of disruptions due to extensive repair work at Penn Station, brought some confusion, some overcrowding and some delays but, apparently, no major problems at the beginning of what figures to be an arduous two-month period.
As the crowd of rail commuters heading into the country’s busiest train station grew, so did the confusion. Some seemed bewildered by a new routine devised to accommodate the major repairs to the station’s tracks and signals.
“A lot of confusion and too many people gathered in one space,” Lex Marshall, 35, of Morristown, New Jersey, said at New Jersey Transit’s Hoboken Terminal. “Everybody’s just bumping into each other, pushing each other, to get to their destination.”
Jesse Krakow, of South Orange, New Jersey, who transferred through Hoboken, described being packed “like sardines” on a Port Authority Trans-Hudson train that stopped several times between stations as it waited for other trains up ahead. He said his trip took about 45 minutes longer than normal.