About njt.live

An independent, live measurement of how punctual NJ Transit's trains actually are, built from the same public departure boards riders see on the platform.

Why

NJ Transit does not publish rail on-time performance in any usable form, and the monthly figures it reports to its board are self-measured averages that hide which trains, which stations and which hours are bad. Riders know the 6:15 is always late; nobody counts. This site counts.

How it works

• Expected. Scheduled departure times come from NJ Transit's printed timetables (the PDF timetables), parsed automatically, including special-service and holiday-only trains.
• Actual. The public DepartureVision departure board of each of the 70 monitored stations is polled about once a minute. A train's actual departure is inferred from when it leaves the board: its last countdown (“in 2 Min”) puts the departure to about ±1.5 minutes; a train that vanishes without a countdown is timed to the midpoint of the gap, about ±3.5 minutes. A few stations never show a boarding status (the board drops the row on a fixed timer after the train has gone) and are corrected for that.
• On time uses NJ Transit's own definition: a departure is on time if it leaves less than 6 minutes after the timetable.
• Departures, not arrivals. Boards only show departures, so a train's arrival at its final terminal (New York, Hoboken, Dover…) is not observable. The delay at the last measured stop stands in for arrival performance, and it is usually a slight underestimate.
• Cancellations are recorded when the board says so, or when a scheduled train never appears on any board it should have. When a cancelled train's stops are served by another train that changed its own stopping pattern to cover them (an express turned local), the run is measured as rolled into that train rather than counted as cancelled: riders got a train, just a later and more crowded one.
• Left early. A train that departs before its timetable time by more than the measurement error is flagged. NJ Transit counts it as on time; a rider arriving on schedule misses it. Stops the timetable marks “may leave ahead of schedule” are excluded.

What the numbers can and can't say

• Every figure is a departure at a station stop, not a whole train, unless labeled otherwise. A train 20 minutes late at Denville that recovers to 5 minutes at New York counts as late at Denville and on time at New York.
• Amtrak trains and lines not yet onboarded are ignored, even where they share a station.
• Measurement began Mon, Aug 31, 2026. Days with monitoring gaps are marked as not covered rather than counted.
• Live projections (“running +7 min”) are the board's own countdown compared with the timetable and are only as good as the board.

Lines

More lines are being added. njt.live is a personal project and is not affiliated with NJ Transit.