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New Jersey Transit took over operations in 1980. For many years, 30 PCC
streetcars bought from Twin City Rapid Transit in the 1950s were running on the
route. The cars had been built 1946–1949 by the St. Louis Car Company and were
sold by TCRT when that system went through a conversion to buses. Four were
scrapped over the years, and two were sold off to Shaker Heights Rapid Transit
in 1978. In 2001, new light rail cars built by Kinki Sharyo in Japan in 1999
replaced the PCCs.
Some of the PCCs are currently stored in the Newark City Subway shop; current
speculation is that they will likely end up in museums. Eleven have been sold to
the San Francisco Municipal Railway for use on its F Market heritage streetcar
line. One of the Shaker Heights cars has been restored by the Minnesota
Transportation Museum, which operates it on a short stretch of track in western
Minneapolis. Some people in Minneapolis have hoped that some of the remaining
cars may also return to that city to run on a proposed streetcar line on the
Midtown Greenway, but such a project is not likely to begin anytime soon as of
2006.
In 2005, eight PCCs were given to the City of Bayonne to be rehabilitated and
operated along a proposed 2.5 mile loop to serve the Peninsula at Bayonne
Harbor, formerly Military Ocean Terminal at Bayonne (MOTBY). The proposed line
will be connected to the 34th Street station of the Hudson-Bergen Light Rail.
Broad Street Station was renamed Military Park Station on September 4, 2004, to
avoid confusion with the new Newark Light Rail segment to Newark Broad Street
Station.
Bloomfield Extension
On June 22, 2002, the Newark City Subway was extended to the suburbs of
Belleville and Bloomfield along what had been the Erie Railroad's Orange Branch,
now under Norfolk Southern ownership. New stations were opened at Silver Lake
and Grove Street, and the Heller Parkway and Franklin Avenue stations were
combined into a new Branch Brook Park station. The loop at Franklin Avenue was
removed, since the new vehicles are bidirectional, unlike the old PCCs—a new
loop, however, is in place at the Grove Street facility. All the street
crossings on the extension are at-grade.
The original agreement gave sole operating privileges to Norfolk Southern
between 11 p.m. and 1 a.m. daily, but a new agreement allows passenger service
to operate at all hours, with late-night service commencing on January 8, 2005.
In exchange, Norfolk Southern can now operate during all off-peak hours, when
passenger trains are infrequent.[citation needed]
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