Train schedules at Penn Station have returned to normal after eight weeks of summer track work. But "normal" for NJ Transit riders often means late and overcrowded trains. For all the track repairs at Penn Station, nothing was done to solve many of NJ Transit's most urgent problems.

Chief among them is what to do when the "ticking time bomb," which is how experts have described the Hudson River tunnels, goes off.

"After Superstorm Sandy, Amtrak's consultant said that the tunnels would have up to 20 years — and very possibly less," Tom Wright, president of the Regional Plan Association, said in an email. "That was almost five years ago. I would say that experts think the tunnels will need to be shut in ten to fifteen years. It could be more, but it could also be less. "

Amtrak, which owns and maintains the tunnels, now declines to even give a timeline for how long they could last.

"The truth is no one knows precisely how long the tunnel has before it becomes too unreliable to support existing levels of service, which is why the Hudson tunnel project is truly a race against time. We certainly don’t want to find out," Amtrak spokesman Craig Schulz said. 

From July 10 until September 5, more than 7,000 NJ Transit riders got a taste of what not having access to Penn Station was like, as track work forced them to find a new way into the city.

For some, like East Orange resident Marcos Elias, it meant taking an NJ Transit train to Hoboken and switching to a PATH train. It added 10 to 20 minutes each way, but he didn't mind.

"The commute was more comfortable, it was a good idea," he said. If NJ Transit kept offering discounted fares and free transfers for ferries, buses and the PATH, he'd continue using that route, alleviating the load on Penn Station.

Fellow commuter Marisha Craig agrees she'd be happy to avoid Penn if NJ Transit made it easier. "We should be able to have a transfer to go and take those different options," she said.

Those different options didn't cost riders anything, but it cost NJ Transit $15 million. That cost just adds to the agencies ongoing funding crisis. The agency also owes back payments to Amtrak for more than $90 million for use of Penn Station. In April, Gov. Chris Christie ordered NJ Transit to stop paying Amtrak, citing the ongoing track failures. 

NJ Transit is also having a trouble finding enough engineers to run its trains. An investigation by The Record found some of their engineers were lured to MetroNorth for better paying jobs, and that since 2015 that agency has hired 100 engineers, while NJ Transit,which offers a lower salary, hired just four engineers.

Doug O'Malley, an activist with the group Environment New Jersey, said one indication of how dire the agency's finances have become is that the agency has been raiding its capital budget to pay for operating expenses. That's in part because since 2005, the state’s financial support of NJ Transit has decreased by 90 percent. O’Malley said riders are feeling the effects.

"Really the chickens (are) coming home to roost. Transit riders are fed up," O'Malley said. "NJ Transit pays the highest fares in the nation. We have unacceptable service, and transit riders don't know when things are going to get better. Really, that's why when things weren't a disaster this summer, I think riders said 'this is better than what it was.'"

At NJ Transit's monthly board meeting in September, after regular service was restored, the board didn't discuss anything they may have learned about the summer's experience that they could apply to future outages or improve rider's daily commutes. While the agency received commuter surveys, it didn't discuss the results at this meeting.

One of the surveys, the Customer Satisfaction Survey, shows that from April to June, riders gave the agency a 3.8 out of 10 for "overall satisfaction." That's down from a six the previous quarter. The results of the quarter that covers the summer haven't been released yet.

On the bright side, NJ Transit points out that in a different survey taken over the summer, 69 percent of customers were satisfied with communication while the summer track work took place.

But five years after Sandy, with a summer-long transit experiment and reams of commuter feedback under their belt, the agency said they’ve learned nothing new about how they would get commuters across the river. 

Nancy Snyder, a spokeswoman for the agency, told WNYC that every disaster is different and Sandy was a good example of how NJ Transit would respond to a tunnel failure. But she said nothing this summer changes how the agency would get commuters across the river if the Hudson River tunnels failed. She said that a Sandy contingency plan would look different from a rail stoppage plan.

 "One of the things we did learn from past events is that our customers did their homework," Snyder said. "We advised our customers to look at travel plans and have a plan A, plan B, see what works well for them. Customers did their homework and found the best way into the city."  

It’s not clear if the agency is taking its own advice.