New Jersey's 107-year-old Portal Bridge has been a symbol of the region's crumbling rail infrastructure. A $1.7 billion project to replace the bridge, launched this week, is designed to improve the situation.
"Officials broke ground Friday on the first piece of a complex and costly project to rebuild and replace the aging rail infrastructure that carries thousands of New Jersey commuters daily into New York," reports Curtis Tate.
The Portal Bridge Project will spend $1.5 billion to add "critical residency and create new capacity" on a ten-mile stretch of the Northeast Corridor between Newark and Penn Station, according to the article.
The Portal Bridge, a 107-year-old span in the Meadowland, "sometimes gets stuck when it opens a few times a week for barges on the Hackensack River" and has "become a major bottleneck on the nation's busiest commuter corridor," according to Tate. Planetizen has been covering the saga of the Portal Bridge since 2014.
FULL STORY: $1.5B project to replace critical New Jersey rail bridge over Hackensack River starts
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