Updated March 3, 2026, 5:50 p.m. ET
Amtrak has scheduled urgent repairs on the tracks in New York Penn Station that will align with the final 10 days of the “Portal Cutover,” NorthJersey.com has exclusively learned.
This work was not previously disclosed during multiple media briefings in January and February about the four-week process that began Feb. 15 and required reducing Amtrak and NJ Transit service in order to activate one track on the new Portal North Bridge.
“When we made our initial plans for the Portal Cutover months ago, these specific tracks looked in OK condition,” Jason Abrams, an Amtrak spokesman, said in response to emailed questions from NorthJersey.com.
“However, we have started to see some deterioration,” Abrams said. “Out of an abundance of caution, we decided to piggyback this work with the Portal Cutover project to prevent future unplanned service disruptions.”
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The work, which is costing about $3.5 million and being paid for using Amtrak’s state of good repair program, is starting March 9 and scheduled to end the evening of March 15, the same day the cutover process is expected to end.
Won’t cause more service disruptions unless problems crop up
Amtrak’s project will not require additional service reductions and will use a different team from the one dedicated to the cutover project to complete this work, Abrams said.
Any hiccup in the work, however, could cause service reductions or train cancellations, which would exacerbate frustrations from Amtrak and NJ Transit customers, who are already dealing with service reduction of more than 50% due to the cutover.
Many commuters have had to add time to travel schedules because some trains diverted from Penn Station to Hoboken, where transfers are available to buses, ferries or PATH trains into Manhattan, or to ensure connections at the Secaucus Junction train station.
The $2.3 billion Portal North 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 the 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.
Equipment to be replaced
Four switches and an intersection crossing — an area that connects multiple tracks between Penn Station and the Hudson River rail tunnel — will be replaced in the coming days.
This track area is heavily used during normal hours at Penn Station, the busiest transportation hub in North America, and a failure could derail a train.
In spring 2017, there were multiple derailments in this area between the tunnel mouth and Penn Station, which required Amtrak to reduce rail service over the summer so workers could complete $40 million in emergency upgrades on track switches.
The switches that will be the focus of work this month are in the same area as the work that was completed in 2017, but at a different interlocking — or switch area — that wasn’t upgraded nine years ago.
“We monitor all of our components closely, and this particular component is showing signs of fatigue,” Abrams said. “Given its location, tackling this concurrently with the Portal North Bridge outage reduces the total time passengers are impacted.”
