After 114 Years, America's Most Hated Bridge Is Finally Being Retired

The Portal North cutover marks a turning point for the Gateway Program — and a month of misery for Northeast Corridor commuters

Starting Thursday, Amtrak will begin transferring rail traffic from the 114-year-old Portal Bridge to the newly constructed Portal North Bridge over the Hackensack River in Kearny, New Jersey — a milestone that has been decades in the making and arrives at a moment when the broader Gateway Program faces an uncertain political future.

The cutover, which will trigger approximately four weeks of reduced service across nearly every NJ Transit rail line and the Northeast Corridor, requires the deactivation of legacy infrastructure, reconfiguration of track alignments, and the integration of new signalling, power, and communications systems. Regular schedules are not expected to resume until March 15. Hundreds of thousands of daily commuters between New Jersey and New York will face consolidated or cancelled trains, rerouted Midtown Direct services, and sharply altered departure times.

It is, by any measure, a short-term headache in exchange for a generational fix. The original Portal Bridge — a low-level swing span that had to open for river traffic and was notorious for mechanical failures — has been the single most persistent source of delays on the busiest passenger rail corridor in the United States. When it stuck, as it frequently did, the ripple effects cascaded from Washington to Boston.

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The new high-level fixed bridge eliminates the swing mechanism entirely, removing the bottleneck that plagued the roughly 450 trains and 200,000 passenger trips that cross the Hackensack daily. A second cutover phase is scheduled for autumn, after which the original bridge will be permanently decommissioned.

But the milestone also arrives against a politically charged backdrop. The Gateway Program — the broader, $16 billion effort to double tunnel capacity under the Hudson River — has secured more than $12 billion in federal commitments, yet tunnel boring has yet to begin, and the Trump administration's Federal Railroad Administration recently suspended Hudson Tunnel Project disbursements pending a review. Amtrak's leadership insists the programme remains on track, with boring now targeted for mid-2026.

For the quarter-million commuters bracing for a disrupted February, the Portal North cutover is both vindication and a reminder: the hardest infrastructure in America to build is the infrastructure America cannot afford to live without.