If you have tried to take a train out of Penn Station this week, you have already noticed. If you are planning to visit Philadelphia, Washington or your in-laws in Montclair before Nov. 15, you are about to. For five weeks this fall, the busiest rail corridor in the country is squeezing through a single track in the Jersey Meadowlands, all so that a 116-year-old swing bridge can finally retire.
The occasion is the Portal North Bridge cutover, the last act of a $2.3 billion project to replace the century-old Portal Bridge over the Hackensack River, as Gothamist reported. Crews are moving the final track from the old bridge to its replacement, and while they do, trains run on a single track between Newark and Secaucus. The schedules shrank accordingly, starting Oct. 10 for Amtrak and Oct. 11 for NJ Transit.
The arithmetic
NBC10 Philadelphia laid out the cuts, citing Amtrak and NJ Transit. Acela drops from 20 weekday trains to 18. The Northeast Regional goes from 44 to 40. The Keystone, the Harrisburg line that many Philadelphians use to reach New York, falls from 24 weekday trains between Philadelphia and New York to 10, though full service continues between Harrisburg and Philadelphia. NJ Transit runs 113 weekday trains instead of 133.
For the New Yorker heading south, the message is simple: fewer trains, fuller trains, book early. The Acela, in particular, which is not a cheap ride even in a normal week, will be operating with less room for the last-minute business traveler who assumed there would always be another one in an hour.
The Hoboken detour
The inconvenience falls hardest on New Jersey’s Midtown Direct commuters. Weekday trains on the Morris & Essex, Gladstone Branch and Montclair-Boonton lines, which normally run into Penn Station, are being diverted to Hoboken, Gothamist reported; on weekends they still run to Penn. NJ Transit told CBS New York that about 30,000 daily Midtown Direct riders are affected.
From Hoboken, riders can take PATH to 33rd Street, the 126 bus to the Port Authority Bus Terminal, or a NY Waterway ferry to West 39th Street. One commuter told CBS that the detour adds 30 to 45 minutes to her trip. “I think people are annoyed because, to be honest, in Jersey transit, cancellations are frequent enough to cause delays, and so just another delay is just going to be annoying for people,” said another.
All but one NJ Transit line, the Atlantic City Rail Line, is seeing schedule changes, and separate construction is putting some riders on the North Jersey Coast, Port Jervis and Raritan Valley lines onto buses, per Gothamist. Amtrak, meanwhile, is using the reduced traffic to knock out eight maintenance projects along the Northeast Corridor. If you are going to have a bad five weeks, you might as well fix everything at once.
Why it’s worth it
The old Portal Bridge is the kind of infrastructure that only New Yorkers and New Jerseyans could tolerate for so long. It is a swing bridge, which means that when a boat needs to pass, the bridge opens, and the trains stop. And sometimes, Gothamist noted, the bridge has gotten stuck. Because the bridge sits on the line that carries Amtrak and NJ Transit into Manhattan, a single mechanical hiccup in the Meadowlands has, for decades, been able to snarl the evening commute for tens of thousands of people.
The bridge’s age is its own argument. If CBS’s figure of 116 years is right, it dates to 1910, the year the original Pennsylvania Station opened. That station was demolished more than six decades ago and has since been mourned, replaced, renovated and argued over many times. The bridge that carried its trains across the Hackensack simply kept swinging open and shut, until now.
The replacement is taller, doubling the clearance for boats so that trains no longer have to stop for them. Kris Kolluri, NJ Transit’s chief executive, made his case to CBS with the air of a man who knows exactly how many angry emails he is going to receive: “I respectfully ask our commuters to give us five weeks so that this bridge won’t be a problem for the next 100 years.” The agencies, in their joint statement to NBC10, acknowledged that “the short-term inconvenience customers will experience is not insignificant,” but said the work “will deliver lasting benefits for decades to come.”
It is also a milestone for the Gateway Program, the larger, much-debated effort to modernize the rail link between New Jersey and Manhattan, which counts the Portal North Bridge among its projects.
How to travel until Nov. 15
A few practical suggestions for the next month:
If you are taking Amtrak to Philadelphia or Washington, book now and check the adjusted schedules on Amtrak’s site and app before you go. The cancelled trains are not evenly distributed, and the train you took last month may simply not exist this month.
If you are going to the Jersey suburbs on a weekday, budget extra time and consider PATH from Hoboken, which is a perfectly civilized way to arrive at Herald Square.
And if you are planning a weekend trip out of town, notice that weekend Midtown Direct trains still run to Penn, and that the full schedule is expected back on Nov. 15, with NBC10 reporting regular schedules resuming Monday, Nov. 16. That is, conveniently, just in time to start worrying about Thanksgiving.
The City Politic has reached out to Amtrak, NJ Transit and the Gateway Development Commission for comment and will update this story with any response.
Photo: The Portal North Bridge under construction over the Hackensack River, January 2025. Jonathan Schilling / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0.
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