EWR to New York Penn Station

Typically when I need to travel to New York, I would fly to Newark (EWR). In my experience the best way to get into the city from EWR is using the train. You can quickly hop on the Air Train from any terminal that will take you to the "Newark Liberty" station and from there get into New York Penn Station in about 25 minutes. This is the quickest way (unless you can expense the US Helicopter service offered by Continental that will put you in the city in 8 minutes for $159). The train is great and provides a smooth ride without traffic and the traumas typically caused after riding a cab with New York drivers.

The only bad thing about using the train was the horrible vending machines that sold the tickets. It could take 5-10 minutes to purchase a ticket! The machines would not accept always every credit card (I had to go through different AMEX cards and then try Visa) and then the authorization process could take a couple of minutes (seems like they still had some 2,400 kbps modem dialing in the background...). Today when I arrived to EWR and went to purchase the ticket I was surprised to see a new vending machine. They improved the user interface and now instead of entering the code of Penn Station there's a quick button (since most people go there anyway), so with a single button you complete the purchase process and the most important thing the credit card confirmation was just a couple of seconds! Finally a quick purchase experience for the NJ Transit train!