Septa Jenkintown

Parking is a nightmare here. If you do not have a permit or don’t arrive before 7am you can almost forget it. Trying to use this station off peak is a no go for parking EVER! I always have to get a ride to this station and get picked up. Why can’t they add more parking? Going out of the way to Glenside where I can run into the same issue as well makes it so frustrating to even try.
Look I get that ppl don’t want expansion in the surrounding neighborhoods and that they think there would be too much increased traffic but you can manage these things with better flow and street light planning. It is not that hard if you know what you are doing. It is either do that or you cannot grow ridership, improve the environment and get cars off the street. If no then Wyncote/​Jenkintown should work on creating sidewalks. I cannot even walk there safely and I am less than a mile away.
There’s the rub.

This is one of the best train stations in the entire SEPTA system. I specifically looked for an apartment next to this station, because it is such an awesome station to be located near. I think this station is an incredible asset to the neighborhood. It was a major selling point of the apartment my girlfriend and I chose, and living next to it is a huge improvement in my quality of life.
Train service here is excellent. Minus a few quirks, the trains generally run often enough that if you’re headed into Philly, you can just show up at this station without checking a schedule, and you’ll be guaranteed to get something usually with at most a 15 minute wait. Pick up a Glenside Combined schedule if you’re only concerned about the trains going between this station and center city. (Glenside is one stop beyond this one)
Going farther out into the suburbs, you get lots of options: the Doylestown, Warminster, and West Trenton lines all go through this station, and it’s the last station before these three lines fork off.
But another huge asset of train travel is the direct trains you get going «out the other side» of center city. Once the Jenkintown lines get to center city, they turn into other lines and head out to various destinations, including (a) Airport (b) Paoli/​Thorndale (The main line) © Media /​Elywn Line (which goes through 49^th street in West Philly, and Swarthmore) (d) Marcus Hook/​Wilmington/​Newark DE (SW suburbs into Delaware), and (e) Trenton Transit Center (NJ, this station, and not West Trenton, connects with NJ Transit to NYC) All this means that, with careful checking of the schedule, you can get direct trips from Jenkintown to all of these destinations. Pretty awesome if you ask me.
Yet another perk of this station? Great ticket counter hours. The ticket counter here sells all sorts of passes and tokens, and has very reasonable hours (open near rush hour weekdays and most of the day saturday), among the best hours of any station in the system.
Yet another perk? You can often get a cab here at night, getting off the train on the Jenkintown side. Not quite guaranteed, but I’ve seen cabs waiting here more often than other suburban locations, where you usually need to call a cab.
It keeps getting better. The SEPTA station provides a convenient pedestrian underpass while the Greenwood ave. bridge is under construction. An extra perk! And it’s adjacent to the beautiful Ralph Morgan Park in Wynwood, a little greenway along Tacony creek with paved paths along both sides of the creek… saves you walking along the road about a third of the way to Glenside, and just a pleasant place to take a stroll.
The only sad thing about this station… it used to have both a restaurant and a coffee shop in it… and both closed. This makes me really sad. I hope that some day, both can re-​open because I feel like having a restaurant and a coffee shop in an awesome SEPTA station like this is just such a great idea, and again, a huge asset to the neighborhood. The closest café/​restaurant is Linda Jean’s, which I like very much, and recommend checking out (it’s on the Wyncote side, on Greenwood ave.) if you haven’t.
But seriously this station is awesome!