The Train to the Plane — Newark Airport updated September 2002

There is now a rail connection to Newark airport. They spent a billion dollars on this and it is pretty lame. You take a train to a station near the airport and then get on a monorail to the terminals. It takes about 25 minutes on the train and then 10-15 minutes on the monorail, depending on the terminal you go to. They are getting the kinks out of the system; when it works it is good, but when the system doesn’t work it can be awful. There are 3 terminals at Newark. Allow 50 minutes to an hour to get to the airport terminal once the train leaves the station in New York. However, it takes longer to get back to the city from the airport. Trains can leave at very inconvenient intervals (ie: a half hour apart) and while the New Jersey transit trains cost $11.50 each way, an Amtrak train costs $27 one way. For this you could either take the $12 bus which gets you there in under half an hour and which leaves every 20 minutes or take a taxi already ($55 door to door). Another problem from the airport: Trains going to the airport are originating at Penn Station in New York City so they leave pretty much when the monitors say so. Trains passing through Newark airport are often late coming from far away, and the monitors post scheduled times without noting when the trains are actually supposed to pass by. These can differ by 20-30 minutes, so you can buy a ticket for an 8:45 train and then go down to the rail at 8:40 to see an 8:20 train come by. The smartest thing to do if you are not sure what is going on is to buy tickets for both train systems and get a refund on the ticket you don’t use (or just save it around for next trip). Or just buy the ticket on the train and pay the extra few dollars service fee to the conductor. Trains in America are atrocious; we have things timed perfectly so that just as you step out of a train into a station, your connecting train is just pulling out of the station. Under construction is the rail connection to JFK airport and this is expected to be quite lousy; it requires a transfer at Jamaica station. Zurich it ain’t here.