With PATCO flooded, riders adapted to a trainless commute

PATCO’s nearly 38,000 riders awoke Thursday morning to the news that the storms that thundered through the region overnight had deprived them of their route to work.

Commuters took to bus, car, rideshare, and even the little-used Atlantic City Line to get to work. Many were hours late for work but found ways to cope with delays and circuitous routes.

“I’m a writer,” said Gabriella McCann, 32, a SEPTA worker who travels from Collingswood to Center City for work. “That’s my go-to thing to do when I’m standing there waiting for a bus for 45 minutes, and I’m dying of heat.”

Instead of taking the train, McCann relied on a NJ Transit bus and composed a poem about her experience. It ended:

"Forgive me

I am so late

And

So sweaty."

PATCO promised the evening commute would be better. The agency expected the system to be back on a regular schedule by 6 p.m. Thursday.

Ashland station, which had been closed most of Thursday, reopened about 5 p.m.

“It’s just going to depend,” Hanson said. “Our goal is to improve service before evening rush, but not sure if we’ll be able to accomplish that or not.”

While trains are running, repair crews will still be working to get the tracks back to working order. Heavy rains overnight flooded tracks between Woodcrest and Haddonfield stations, and washed away ballast, the gravel that is needed to keep tracks stable, at other sites. Still to be repaired is a sinkhole that formed at the Haddonfield station’s platform, and lost ballast near the Ferry Avenue station.

“The work’s going to continue in those places,” Hanson said. “That’s why we’re going to have 28-minute headways.”

One of the first people to be inconvenienced by the service shutdown may have been Aileen Elizabeth Bunch, a musician who lives in Collingswood and had returned to Philadelphia by bus from a rehearsal in New York City about 1 a.m. Thursday. She got on a Lindenwold-bound train at Eighth and Market Streets.

“The train didn’t leave,” she said from her home later Thursday morning. “The announcements said a lightning strike or a power outage had happened in New Jersey.”

After about 15 minutes, she said, the train left, crossed the Ben Franklin Bridge, stopped at City Hall station in Camden and then pulled into the Broadway station, where PATCO workers got on the train and told passengers the train was unable to proceed farther east and would be turning around and heading back into Philly.

“I’d say there was a collective moan, and everybody just trudged off the train,” said Bunch, who estimated there were perhaps 10 to 15 people aboard.

“I called my husband, who was going to pick me up at the Collingswood station, and he came and got me at Broadway. We gave a couple of other people rides to pick up their cars at Ferry Avenue.”

NJ Transit reported heavier than usual ridership on its Atlantic City Line, which was able to run Thursday morning despite the heavy rains. That line, though, runs far less frequently than PATCO, which gave Michaela Cline, 30, an hour to wait at the station at Lindenwold. She took a bus there, and it arrived about an hour before the next train.

“I went to Burger King, got a little breakfast and ate, and listened to music and passed the time that way,” Cline said.

Her commute to her job at the Kimmel Center, typically about an hour, required her to overshoot her job to go to 30th Street Station, and then she took a Lyft back to Broad Street. The trip took her twice as long as usual Thursday.

Jackie Vasinda, 35, got an impromptu monologue on the intricacies of local bowling leagues from the Lyft driver she relied on to get her from home in Haddon Township to Camden, where she was able to get on a PATCO train still operating from there to Philadelphia.

“He was talking about his league, his average, and how good they were, and now that all of his teammates are finding girlfriends and getting married, they’re not going to continue next season,” she said.

She got to her data analyst job in West Philadelphia after a three-leg trip: Lyft to PATCO to the El.

“It was about 30 minutes,” Vasinda said. “It really wasn’t that bad.”

One commuter, Mike Boyce, decided he turned out to be lucky he accidentally slept in Thursday. He usually walks about 15 to 20 minutes to PATCO’s Collingswood station, but the storm kept him up overnight, he said, and he was running late, so decided to drive to the station. When he got there, someone yelled at him, “Train’s down!”

From there, Boyce said, he drove to work at his IT job in North Philadelphia.

“I decided on my driveway, ‘I’m not going to walk; I’m going to drive,’” the 32-year-old said. “Oh God, I would have been pissed if I walked there.”

Staff writer Kevin Riordan contributed to this article.