Portal Bridge Presents Northeast Rail Commuters With a 104-Year-Old Problem.
It carries more passenger trains than any other railroad bridge in the Western Hemisphere, yet few people beyond those who rely on it have heard of it. It goes largely unnoticed, unless something goes wrong, which happens with irritating frequency. After all, the bridge is 104 years old.
Every time it swings open to let a boat pass is a test of early-20th-century technology that can snarl train travel from Boston to Washington, the nation’s busiest rail corridor. And over the years, since it is partially made out of wood, it also has proved to be quite flammable.
To the tens of thousands of commuters on the hundreds of trains that cross it going to or coming from New York City, the Portal Bridge is infamous.
Since the start of last year, the bridge has been blamed for about 250 delays on the rails, according to New Jersey Transit, which is its heaviest user. . .
Within Amtrak, which owns and operates it, the Portal is known as the “Achilles’ heel of the Northeast Corridor,” said Drew Galloway, assistant vice president for planning and development. “There are maintenance crews there around the clock. But you can only do so much to a century-old swing bridge.” . .
Indeed, the bridge was expected to last 100 years, so it is swinging on borrowed time. Federal transportation officials have recognized its precarious state for many years, and they have a plan to replace it with a two-track bridge tall enough for boats to pass under it.
But that plan carries an estimated price of $900 million, none of which has been lined up yet. Mr. Galloway said Amtrak is pushing the project, with New Jersey Transit as its local partner. New Jersey Transit, which operates commuter trains and buses throughout the state, split the $32 million cost of the preliminary engineering of a replacement with Amtrak and also paid $12 million toward its final design.
When New Jersey’s governor, Chris Christie, a Republican, announced that New Jersey Transit was canceling its plan to build rail tunnels under the Hudson River to Manhattan, he criticized Democratic elected officials for failing to include funding for a new Portal Bridge in that project. In 2011, Mr. Christie said he had let federal officials know that New Jersey was prepared to contribute a “significant amount of money” toward a new bridge. . .
“The problem with this 100-year-old bridge is when something breaks, they literally have to go back to the machine shop and make a new part,” Mr. Sheehan said. “There isn’t a Bridges ‘R’ Us that has what they need.”
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