Significant schedule changes could upend rail service for NJ Transit and Amtrak customers in early 2026 so workers can get some of the final pieces in place to open the new Portal North Bridge next year, NorthJersey.com has learned.
Some trains will likely need to be rerouted or canceled over what could be about six weeks.
NJ Transit President and CEO Kris Kolluri said the schedule is being finalized and will be presented to the public sometime in December.
“The Portal Bridge project is moving at a good pace and there will be some changes coming from a construction standpoint that will require some schedule changes,” Kolluri said.
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“We look forward to briefing the mayors and other elected officials to make sure there’s a full and thorough vetting of the process,” he said.
The work that will take place in early 2026 and require significant changes to train schedules is known as “the cutover,” a complicated process of tracks, wiring, signals, communication systems and other technology pieces that need to be installed.
Stephen Gardner, the former CEO of Amtrak, described some of this process during a site visit with reporters in February.
“There is the construction work with all these assets you see here and then there’s the cutover, which is the interface of the existing railway,” Gardner said.
Then-Amtrak CEO Stephen Gardner speaks during a press conference about construction of the third and final arch for the Portal North Bridge over the Hackensack River in Kearny on Wednesday, Feb. 26, 2025.
“There’s more work than what you see here that has to happen and that’s interfacing the existing tracks, switches and signals with the new so that work will begin and be phased,” Gardner said, “to allow us to use single track at first and then eventually the full functionality of the bridge.”
The $2.3 billion bridge project will replace the existing Portal Bridge, a 115-year-old swing-span structure over the Hackensack River between Kearny and Secaucus that is prone to failure, causing delays for both NJ Transit and Amtrak trains headed to and from New York Penn Station.
Construction on this project began in 2022 and the new bridge is expected to go into service in late 2026. The full project will be finished in 2027, a timeline Kolluri confirmed is still on track.
This article originally appeared on NorthJersey.com: Cutover to new bridge could disrupt NJ Transit, Amtrak for weeks
