Angels and demons ride the rails and New Jersey Transit conductors and collectors have to collect tickets from them all. And on too many occasions, the rail workers get verbally and physically abused in the process.

This was re-enforced for me on my regular trip on the North Jersey Coast Line this week that runs from Bayshore to New York Penn Station.

I had taken the 8:48 a.m. out of Bradley Beach in time to be in the front row of Mayor Adams weekly Tuesday press briefing in New York City’s City Hall. With Christmas less than a week away, the train was crowded by a mix of families with small children, regular commuters, and the elderly and disabled for whom New Jersey Transit is the only way to get to the doctor.

And on my rail roundtrip that day, a couple of experienced fare evaders, one on the way in, the other on the way back home to Neptune.

These are folks that only Mark Twain could really appreciate–the grinning grifters who have well practiced strategies to get from point A to point B without paying their train fare. There’s the ‘the other guy got my ticket’ or the tried and untrue ‘I just had it a second ago’ followed by a vigorous checking of their pockets pantomime.

On this day, somewhere after Long Branch a bearded man in his 30s with a bicycle carrying shopping bags over flowing with a few hundred Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups got on the train with a female with her own bike. At first, when he was asked for his ticket, he said he was too stoned and didn’t know which day it was or where he had gotten on, as for the ticket—maybe ‘the other guy’ got it.

As the encounter escalated, the errant passenger called the conductor an obscene name  just inches from the rail workers face. The conductor was composed and professional in the face of the abuse while continuing to get passengers on and off the train as we chugged eastward toward Newark. At one point, as we headed toward Linden the conductor radioed for New Jersey Transit Police assistance to remove the ticketless traveler.

At one point, hoping to decompress the situation, I offered to pay his fare. As a half-century plus commuter I have experienced the prolonged delays that can result when a train is held waiting for the NJ Transit Police to arrive and I was already cutting it close. And it is the Christmas Season. In my brief conversation with the candy laden fare evader he told me he was 38 years old, undomiciled and an ex-offender who had done four years in jail in Pennsylvania on a domestic violence case involving his traveling companion.

Like I said, a real Mark Twain character.

He told me he regretted mouthing off at the Conductor and offered me two packages of Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups for my attempt to pay it forward by paying his fare to keep the trains running on time. I passed on the free candy. A stop later, he gleefully got off the train, peddled down the station platform with his partner having eluded the police who never materialized.

On the way back home during the early evening rush, a different Conductor dealt with another variation on the fare evasion theme, an adult who habitually buys a child’s ticket he offers up as part of his own self-styled discount program.

Fortunately, the fare evading encounters I witnessed didn’t result in physical injury to the transit workers who feel a sense of obligation to the fare paying public and to New Jersey Transit which is supported by taxpayers. Even before the pandemic hit, unions that represent transit workers were reporting a serious uptick across the country of physical assaults on train and bus personnel who were violently attacked for trying to enforce the most rudimentary of commonsense rules.

Last June, the troubling trend prompted New Jersey Transit to launch a “Ride Kind” campaign to try and address the spike in assaults on train crews and bus operators. A month earlier, the New Jersey Monitor reported that NJ Transit workers, reported on the filing of a federal lawsuit that was just the “latest in a series of lawsuits alleging the agency’s police officers don’t act quickly enough to calls from conductors and that the agency has failed to protect crew members from ‘belligerent’ passengers even after repeated calls for more protections.”

In the May reporting, the New Jersey Monitor recounted the tragic story of Michelle Schwartz,  a ticket collector on the North Jersey Coast Line who  “alleges a rider cursed at her and tried to spit at her before punching her, causing her to hit a wall and suffer brain bleed and vision damage.”

“This has been going on for a long time and hasn’t stopped,” Robert Meyers, the plaintiffs’ attorney, told the Monitor. “These incidents have happened at different stations, different rail lines. They are very common … It’s just an ongoing problem that hasn’t stopped.”

In May, a man was arrested at the Secaucus Junction train station after he threw a cup of hot coffee into the face of an assistant conductor because he allegedly didn’t want to pay his train fare.

In October of 2021, during the pandemic a man pulled a knife on an NJ Transit Train conductor on the Bergen Line after he was asked to wear a mask.

Just this past October, in Philadelphia Bernard Gribbin, 45, a  SEPTA Bus Driver,  was shot and killed on the job.

Alarmingly, this increase in attacks on transit workers tracks a similar trend in hospitals like we saw earlier this month with the slashing of three healthcare workers  at a Newark hospital. All three survived the attack but such incidents can cause lifelong trauma on the workers that experience them.

Evidently, essential workers, those who can’t work remotely ,are increasingly at risk of being injured and even killed on the job.

According to the most recent U.S. Department of Labor Bureau of Statistics report issued Dec. 19 , close to  5,500 workers died as a result of on-the-job injuries in 2022, the highest number in a decade and a 5.7 percent  increase over the previous year. 524 of those workers were murdered while they were on the job, almost a nine percent spike from 2021.

We all can’t be a superhero rushing in to ‘save the  day’ when we witness  essential workers being abused or attacked, but we can help them cope with the invisible scars that come from these encounters that endure in the form of moral injury, a sense that the worker is not backed up by the very systems they put their life on the line to uphold.

Thank them on the days that nothing happens. Be present. They always are.