SEPTA is adding more Regional Rail trains next month, bringing service level closer to pre-pandemic status

PHILADELPHIA (KYW Newsradio) — SEPTA Regional Rail will get a boost next month, especially during evenings and weekends, as the transit agency gets ever closer to restoring pre-pandemic levels of service.

Starting Sept. 8, look for new timetables as the transit agency adds 99 weekend trains and 24 weekday trains.

SEPTA Chief Operating Officer Scott Sauer says riders have said they wanted more dependable off-peak service.

“We’ve heard from customers — both existing customers who are riding with us every day, and customers who want to ride with us — that they would be more inclined to ride on weekends and evenings if the service was more predictable and more robust,” Sauer said.

Under the changes, Airport Line service returns to every half-hour on weekends, and most Regional Rail lines will bring back hourly weekend trains.

“If they missed that train that they intended to get, they were waiting two hours for the next one.  And this will alleviate some of that anxiety for our customers.”

Sauer says other mass transit systems have reached their full pre-pandemic ridership on the weekends.

“We believe that that demand is out there for SEPTA as well — that there’s a latent demand out there to ride the service on the weekends, for events, for special things going on in the city or even out in the counties,” he said.

Sauer says SEPTA can run more trains now because additional locomotive engineers have been recruited and trained. There are 189 engineers now, and SEPTA hopes to raise their number to 213 by next spring.

“We weren’t ready to put service back until we knew we could put the trains out there on a heftier schedule and then have enough crew to execute. The last thing we wanted to do was schedule a whole lot of trains and wind up canceling them because we didn’t have crew,” Sauer said.

The forthcoming additional service will bring weekday service from 77% to 80% percent of pre-pandemic levels. And weekend service is going from 63% up to 84% percent of pre-pandemic levels.