SEPTA takes the 'R' out of Regional Rail

After July 25, Alea Adams won't call her train from Thorndale to Suburban Station the R5.

SEPTA is dropping its color-coded, R-labeled system and renaming its Regional Rail lines by their current end-destinations.

Adams, a 20-year-old nursing student at the Community College of Philadelphia, will now call her Monday-Thursday train route the Paoli/Thorndale Regional Rail Line.

"I don't understand [the change]," she said. "People are just going to get confused, especially since the [color codes] are gone."

Signs for Adams' R5, on schedules, trains and platform locations, were blue. Other routes were green, orange, yellow, red and brown. But now every route sign will be the same teal and gray.

Elizabeth Mintz, director of communications at SEPTA, said the changeover began three years ago, when SEPTA added the end destinations to the R routes. She said that many of the rail system's 123,000 weekday passengers, especially tourists and those new to the rail system, were confused by the R numbers.

"If you go to any Center City station and talk to a conductor, this is an issue for people who are not familiar with Regional Rail and [the R's] create tremendous confusion," she said.

Andrew Busch, a spokesman for SEPTA, said that the transit company has been talking about the changes publicly for the last year. He said that SEPTA's general manager, Joseph Casey, approved the changes in late winter.

Busch added that SEPTA expects a low level of confusion with the new system, compared with the confusion unfamiliar passengers faced under the R-number system.

"If you rearrange furniture, it takes some time to realize the couch isn't in the same place anymore," Mintz said. "It'll take some getting used to - something that looks and functions differently than [what frequent] riders are used to."

She said that there is one new name change on the train schedules and maps, which should be released within 10 days, besides the recent name change of Pattison Station to the AT&T Station: the renaming of the Norristown line to the Manayunk/Norristown Regional Rail Line because of the tourist interest in the northwest Philadelphia neighborhood.

Matthew Mitchell, of the Delaware Valley Association of Rail Passengers, said that his group didn't agree with eliminating the R-numbers completely, but noted that it's just the names and not the system itself that is changing.

"The basic principle of trains traveling from one outlying line to another via the Center City tunnel is still there and still valid," Mitchell said by e-mail. "The schedules won't show it, but you'll still be able to take a train directly from Elkins Park to the airport, or from Overbrook to Fort Washington."