Weekend Train Service Restored to New Britain

New Britain residents and visitors no longer will have to drive to a nearby train station on weekends.

SEPTA has reinstated a weekend flag stop at the train station in New Britain Borough. Trains will stop to pick up passengers when they are visible on the platform, and will stop to discharge passengers when they signal that they want to get off, according to SEPTA officials.

The schedule change went into effect this past weekend, borough Mayor David Holewinski said.

The new schedule reverses SEPTA's decision in November 2011 to drop train service in the borough on weekends. But it didn't come without a fight.

New Britain residents and leaders like Holewinski have been fighting to get the flag stop reinstated.

In March, borough resident Cornelia Humphries was among a group who appeared at a SEPTA hearing to ask that the stop be reinstated.

"We are extremely upset about this little thing," Humphries said, adding that she can walk to the New Britain station from her home, but on weekends she is either stuck at home or has to drive to DelVal College or Chalfont to get to an open train station. "This is extremely important," she said then.

Other residents agreed with her.

"After that article appeared in the Patch, I got comments from a lot of people who say, 'We like to go in to the city for the theater and having SEPTA is perfect,' " Holewinski told Doylestown Patch on Tuesday. "Having to drive to DelVal or Doylestown, why add traffic to the roads and pollution to the atmosphere, when in some cases they can walk to the New Britain station."

New Britain Borough Council passed a resolution protesting the closure. And Holewinski took their protests to the Bucks County Commissioners, including Charley Martin, who sits on SEPTA's board.

Martin said Tuesday he asked SEPTA administrators to take another look at reestablishing weekend service as a flag stop, which they agreed to do.

Holewinski also met with SEPTA representatives several times to make the borough's case.

"The residents in New Britain, for the most part, are aging, and as an aging group they rely on mass transit a lot more," Holewinski said.

As an industrial engineer before he retired, Holewinski said he timed how long it took travelers to get on and off the train in New Britain. A flag stop takes only 47 seconds for one traveler, he said, and adds only 12 seconds for each additional traveler.

He also noted that the time allotted for travel during the week, when New Britain is a scheduled stop, was less or the same as on the weekends, when New Britain and Link Belt were dropped.

He then took those figures to SEPTA to counter the argument that stopping in New Britain was too expensive.

"How can they say it would be more expensive when travel times are the same or less, well, the logic behind it wasn’t there," Holewinski said.

New SEPTA train schedules:

• from Doylestown to Philadelphia on Saturday and Sunday
• from Philadelphia to Doylestown on Saturday and Sunday

Read more:

• SEPTA Cuts Two Weekend Stops on Doylestown Line
• New Britain Residents to Protest SEPTA Cuts
• New Britain Residents Want Weekend Train Service Back