place by the new year. SEPTA had spent most of December 1982 preparing riders for the likelihood of no train service come the new year. Even with the unions' offers to continue working, SEPTA insisted that a brief shutdown of service would still be necessary, arguing that it would not know until the eleventh hour how many Conrail employees would actually come to work for SEPTA. In addition, SEPTA claimed that these employees would have to be qualified to work on portions of the system unfamiliar to them. A lawyer who regularly commuted from Newtown on the Fox Chase Rapid Transit line filed a class action lawsuit against SEPTA to force the agency to keep trains running. The judge who heard the case, while agreeing that SEPTA probably would not be able initially to operate a full schedule, ordered the agency to keep as much train service running as possible. This resulted in limited service after January 1, 1983 on all the Reading lines and the heavily patronized PRR Paoli line. Full service was gradually restored over the next several weeks. The unions then surprised SEPTA on March 15, 1983, by going on strike, still without contracts, in an action timed to coincide with an expected City Transit Division strike. At the time, the City Transit Division was chafing at SEPTA for discontinuing diesel service on the Fox Chase Rapid Transit Line on January 14, 1983, as personnel were paid higher salaries for traveling a considerable distance to operate trains based in Newtown. SEPTA, however, settled with the transit union shortly before its strike deadline, a move that rail unions took as a betrayal. The rail unions had hoped that with both the railroads and City Transit shut down, the unions could extract whatever settlement they desired. The railroad strike lasted 108 days, and service did not resume until July 3, 1983, when the last holdout union agreed to a contract to settle from the other rail unions. In the end, SEPTA would treat the rail unions workers as railroad workers rather than transit operators, but their pay scale remains lower than that of other Northeast commuter railroads, such as NJ Transit and the Long Island Rail Road. The strike resulted in lower ridership, which took over 10 years to rebuild. Center City tunnel The idea of linking the Philadelphia and Reading lines with an urban tunnel was first adopted