This Critical NJ Bridge Fails One Out of Seven Times It Opens

Achyut Manoj
Jul 24
5 min read

For 116 years, every train running between Newark and New York City crossed the Hackensack River on a single swing span called the Portal Bridge. Built in 1910, the bridge had to physically rotate open whenever a boat needed to pass beneath it, then rotate back and lock into place before trains could cross again. That locking step failed about one out of every seven times. When it did, rail crews grabbed sledgehammers and beat the rails into position by hand while hundreds of trains backed up on the busiest rail corridor in the country.

A single jammed bridge could freeze all Amtrak and NJ Transit service between Newark and Manhattan for hours. In March 2026, after 14 years of funding fights, a $1.56 billion replacement finally opened its first track. The old bridge won't be fully demolished until 2028. It's a fitting timeline for a story about New Jersey's movable bridges: slow, expensive, and never quite finished.

Why New Jersey Needed Bridges That Move in the First Place

New Jersey's coastline and inland waterways are dense with tidal rivers, bays, and shipping channels, the Hackensack, the Raritan, the Passaic, Newark Bay. Federal navigation law requires that any bridge crossing a navigable waterway allow boat traffic to pass, and early twentieth-century engineers had two ways to satisfy that requirement without building an impossibly tall, impossibly expensive fixed span. A swing bridge rotates a section of the deck around a central pier, like a gate opening on a hinge, clearing the channel on either side. A lift bridge raises an entire section straight up between two towers, using massive counterweights to offset the deck's weight so the lifting motors don't have to fight gravity alone.

Both designs work by relying on mechanical parts to align perfectly, every single time, for a century or more. The Portal Bridge rested on six wedge blocks when closed, two at each end and two at the center. To open it, workers withdrew the wedges so the bridge could pivot on its center bearing. Closing it meant reversing that sequence and getting the rails to lock precisely back into place, a process that has to survive rust, thermal expansion, storm damage, and a hundred years of vibration from freight and passenger trains rolling across it thousands of times a year.

Where the System Is Failing Today

Its problems were well documented before the replacement finally opened. A federal report found that the bridge and the adjacent North River rail tunnels together caused roughly 2,000 hours of delay between 2014 and 2018, and the bridge's age forced trains to slow to 60 miles per hour just to cross it safely, a bottleneck for the entire Washington-to-Boston corridor. Roughly 450 Amtrak and NJ Transit trains crossed it daily.

The Portal Bridge isn't an outlier. The Raritan River Bridge, connecting South Amboy and Perth Amboy on NJ Transit's North Jersey Coast Line, opened in 1908 and has spent more than a century absorbing damage: dynamite set off near the bridge during its own construction, a 1914 winter storm that shifted one span four feet out of alignment, and Superstorm Sandy in 2012, which sent seawater over the structure and triggered a transformer explosion. Its replacement, a $595 million project switching the crossing from a rotating drawbridge to a vertical lift span, was targeted for completion in 2026 and is already running behind schedule.

The common thread isn't any single point of failure. It's that New Jersey built dozens of these mechanically complex bridges in a tight window around 1900 to 1920, and a large share of them are still in service, still opening for marine traffic, and still depending on hardware designed for a world with far less rail traffic than crosses them today.

The Engineering Fixes Underway

The clearest fix, when it's affordable, is to stop building bridges that move at all. Portal North Bridge, the Portal Bridge's replacement, is a fixed span built high enough above the water that it doesn't need to open for the boat traffic that still uses the Hackensack. Removing the moving parts entirely eliminates the failure point altogether, since a bridge that never opens can't fail to close. The tradeoff is cost and construction complexity: building a permanently elevated span means longer approach tracks and more excavation than repairing or replacing a low bridge that pivots out of the way.

Where a fixed span isn't practical, engineers are swapping older swing designs for vertical lift bridges, which tend to be more mechanically reliable because the moving section travels straight up and down rather than needing to rotate and re-lock at a precise angle. That's the approach chosen for the new Raritan River crossing. Lift bridges still depend on cables, counterweights, and motors that need regular maintenance, but they remove the wedge-and-lock failure mode that plagued the Portal Bridge for over a century.

For bridges that aren't up for full replacement anytime soon, agencies rely on more frequent inspection and targeted mechanical rehabilitation: replacing gears, motors, and locking mechanisms individually rather than waiting for a full-span failure. It buys time, but it doesn't solve the underlying problem that the bridge is still, fundamentally, a century-old machine.

The Money Fight Behind the Steel

Portal North Bridge shows how long these fixes take even when the engineering solution is well understood. The replacement was approved back in 2008 with an initial price tag of $1.34 billion. Construction didn't begin until August 2022, a 14-year gap driven largely by funding disputes between the state and federal government over who would pay for a project serving both New Jersey commuters and the entire Northeast Corridor's interstate rail traffic.

That funding fight hasn't gone away, it's just moved to a bigger stage. Portal North Bridge is one piece of the larger Gateway Program, a roughly $16 billion effort that also includes new Hudson River rail tunnels to relieve the century-old tubes Amtrak still relies on. In late September 2025, the federal government froze Gateway funding entirely, citing reasons that shifted from claims about diversity policy compliance to a broader budget standoff with congressional Democrats. By February 2026, New Jersey and New York officials were in federal court trying to force the release of more than $205 million in payments the government had already committed to and simply wasn't sending, while construction on the tunnel project sat stalled because the Gateway Development Commission's credit line had run dry.

This same dynamic, a project everyone agrees is necessary getting stuck behind a funding dispute that has nothing to do with the engineering, is the reason so many of New Jersey's other movable bridges are still waiting their turn. Portal Bridge and the Raritan crossing got sustained political attention because they sit on the Northeast Corridor, the busiest and most economically significant rail line in the country. Smaller movable bridges elsewhere in the state don't have that leverage, even when they're carrying similar age and similar risk.

What's Still Unresolved

New Jersey now has one fewer failure-prone movable bridge on its busiest rail line, and a second replacement is under construction on the Raritan. Both took decades longer to fund than to design or build. What's unresolved is what happens to the rest of the state's aging movable bridge inventory, structures built in the same era, using the same vulnerable mechanisms, that don't carry Portal Bridge's political weight or its price tag. Federal funding for even the highest-profile projects remains vulnerable to disputes that have nothing to do with engineering, and every bridge still waiting in line is a wager that the next storm, the next winter, or the next mechanical failure doesn't force the issue first.

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