Another month of commuting hell began Sunday for NJ Transit rail riders as construction on the $2.3 billion Portal North Bridge replacement entered its most disruptive phase.
The work, which will stretch until Nov. 15, requires crews to move the final piece of track onto the new span over the Hackensack River between Kearny and Secaucus, officials said. That milestone marks the most punishing stretch yet of a project that has already brought repeated headaches to customers on one of the nation’s busiest rail corridors.
Nearly every NJ Transit train line will see cancellations and schedule changes while the pivotal Northeast Corridor crossing remains jammed up, according to the transit agency. Riders on the Morris & Essex, Gladstone Branch and Montclair-Boonton lines face the most dramatic rerouting: their weekday trains will no longer terminate at New York’s Penn Station and will instead end in Hoboken.
The company is cross-honoring NJ Transit tickets on its buses and PATH and ferry stations in Hoboken, officials said. But the agency also advised commuters who can work from home to “consider doing so to the greatest extent possible during this time period.”
North Jersey Coast, Port Jervis and Raritan Valley line passengers must rely on buses because of unrelated track and bridge work, officials added. Only customers on the Atlantic City Line, which does not serve Manhattan, escape the disruption entirely.
Amtrak riders will feel the pain too. The national railroad is reducing the frequency of its trains headed to New York Penn Station from the south and west because of the construction, officials said.
The century-old drawbridge being replaced, erected in 1910, forces trains to stop while large ships pass underneath. The new fixed span will eventually eliminate those delays, officials say, allowing maritime traffic to pass freely below.
That promise of long-term relief comes with immediate political baggage. The bridge replacement sits within the broader $17 billion Gateway Project, a politically contentious effort to modernize infrastructure between Newark and Manhattan that remains behind schedule. The Portal North Bridge work itself has repeatedly disrupted service since construction began, with each phase prompting new rounds of complaints from riders who depend on the corridor for daily commutes.
The current disruption caps a difficult period for NJ Transit, which has struggled with reliability even before this latest construction surge. Governor Phil Murphy has faced mounting pressure as delays and rider frustrations have piled up across the system, with the Portal Bridge work amplifying long-standing complaints about aging infrastructure and inadequate service.
The Northeast Corridor serves as the rail spine of the region, carrying hundreds of thousands of passengers daily between Boston and Washington with New York as its crowded center. The Portal Bridge crossing, where the corridor squeezes over the Hackensack River, has long been identified as one of the most significant bottlenecks in the entire system.