Penn Station Closures Planned for World Cup Games in 2026

New Jersey commuters who depend on NJ Transit this summer got a preview Thursday of what World Cup season will actually look like, and it’s not pretty.

NJ Transit CEO Kris Kolluri told the Senate Budget Committee that parts of New York Penn Station will shut down for four hours before each of the eight FIFA World Cup matches at MetLife Stadium in East Rutherford, and only ticketed fans get through. Regular commuters, the people catching the Northeast Corridor home to Princeton Junction or squeezing onto a train toward Woodbridge after a long day, will be cut off.

“If you look at what happens today, we have an open system. Anybody can get on there and you just walk on a train or bus,” Kolluri told the committee. “That is not going to be the case for this event.”

Kolluri, who runs both NJ Transit and the New Jersey Turnpike Authority, framed the closures as a security necessity rather than a logistical inconvenience. The scale is hard to argue with. The agency expects to move 40,000 riders per game, with roughly 28,000 coming from the New York side, almost all of them passing through Penn Station. Four of the eight matches fall on weekdays. One of those weekday games directly overlaps with the afternoon rush.

Not great timing.

Kolluri told lawmakers the security pressure goes well beyond crowd control. The presence of the U.S. president and roughly 14 foreign heads of state at the matches, combined with what he described as geopolitical tensions, demands restrictions the agency has never deployed before. “The eight FIFA games that we are going to conduct at MetLife Stadium are arguably the most important security event we’re going to see in the nation,” he said.

Part of what’s driving the tighter protocols is a concern specific to international soccer culture. Fans in England and parts of Europe have a history of smuggling flares and fireworks into stadiums, and those incidents have caused injuries and, in some cases, deaths. NJ Transit’s open-platform system, where riders typically board without any screening, simply can’t accommodate that risk at this scale, Kolluri said.

Sen. John Burzichelli, a Democrat from Gloucester County, didn’t hide his frustration at the Statehouse hearing in Trenton. “This is an event that just keeps on giving with surprises in this building,” he said. “It seemed like such a good idea originally, and it’s just gotten more and more complicated.”

He’s not wrong. The 2026 FIFA World Cup, which the United States is co-hosting with Canada and Mexico, has been in the pipeline for years. But the operational reality of routing tens of thousands of fans through one of the busiest transit hubs in the country, while maintaining security for a who’s-who of world leaders, is now landing squarely on the shoulders of an agency that’s spent years apologizing for signal delays and broken air conditioning.

The security cordon will also affect service at Secaucus Junction, though the full scope of those impacts wasn’t detailed in Thursday’s testimony.

Reporting from the New Jersey Monitor laid out the match schedule in detail, four weekday games and four weekend games, and flagged that the closures represent an unprecedented challenge for the agency.

Kolluri’s team says they’re ready. Commuters from Hamilton to Hoboken are probably reserving judgment.

The practical question now is what alternatives exist for the hundreds of thousands of daily NJ Transit riders who need Penn Station on those four weekday match days. Kolluri didn’t offer specifics Thursday. Lawmakers will likely push for answers before summer hits and the trains, as they often do, start making promises they can’t keep.

NJ Transit’s service history during summer months has been a persistent sore spot for riders across the region. Layering a security event of this magnitude onto a system already stretched thin is the kind of combination that keeps transit planners up at night.

Summer starts in about ten weeks. The clock is running.