"When it was approaching Princeton Junction, it was still speeding up," said Joe Quijada, who has been commuting daily between West Windsor and New York for the last two years. "I was a little bit scared."

"I knew we were very close to Princeton Junction, but the train was moving awfully fast," Brian O'Leary, another commuter, said. "I was standing near the door, and we could see we flew right by the stop. The next test was to see if we were going to stop at Hamilton, but as we approached we started to slow down."

Adding insult to injury, passengers said, was that when the train pulled into Hamilton at about 7:15 p.m., a northbound train was just leaving on the other side of the tracks, thwarting a quick return to the bypassed station. Stranded passengers had to wait for the 7:51 p.m. train to go back to Princeton Junction.

An NJ Transit spokeswoman said the missed stop was the result of an error by the engineer, a 30-year veteran of the agency, who was working his very first shift on this leg of the Northeast Corridor line on Monday.

"The engineer was new to this assignment," spokeswoman Courtney Carroll said. "His previous assignment stopped at Jersey Avenue."

The train was an express train that made stops at Newark, Newark-Liberty International Airport, and Seacaucus before its scheduled stop at Princeton Junction.

NJ Transit said that, pending the results of an administrative hearing, the engineer could be subjected to disciplinary action.

"It's regrettable and we're quite apologetic," NJ Transit spokesman Dan Stessel said.

He said NJ Transit could not hold up the 7:15 p.m. northbound train at the Hamilton station to accommodate the return of passengers to Princeton Junction. It would have caused delays all along the Northeast Corridor which would have affected far more people that the approximately 500 commuters who suffered through Monday's debacle.

(This item appeared Nov. 11, 2009, in the Star Ledger.)