Penn Station Closures Planned for World Cup Games in 2026

NJ Transit commuters heading home to Princeton Junction or Woodbridge this summer are going to hit a wall. A four-hour wall, to be specific, erected before each of the eight FIFA World Cup matches at MetLife Stadium in East Rutherford.

NJ Transit CEO Kris Kolluri told the Senate Budget Committee on Thursday that sections of New York Penn Station will go dark to regular passengers for four hours before every game. Only ticketed fans get through. If you’re not headed to the stadium, you’re not getting to your train. Not through Penn Station, anyway.

“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.”

The numbers explain some of the headache. NJ Transit expects 40,000 riders per game. Around 28,000 of them will be coming from the New York side, almost all flowing through Penn Station. Four of the eight matches land on weekdays. One of those weekday games lines up directly with the afternoon rush. That’s not a scheduling coincidence anyone planned well.

Kolluri runs both NJ Transit and the New Jersey Turnpike Authority, so he’s got a wide-angle view of what this operation requires. He framed the Penn Station closures not as a service failure but as a security mandate. The U.S. president is expected to attend matches. So are roughly 14 foreign heads of state. That changes the security calculus entirely.

“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.

There’s also a concern that doesn’t get enough attention in the American press: flares. Fans in England and parts of Europe have a documented habit of smuggling pyrotechnics into stadiums, and those incidents have caused injuries and, in some cases, deaths. NJ Transit’s open-platform boarding, where nobody’s screening you before you step onto the Northeast Corridor, can’t absorb that risk with this crowd volume. It won’t.

The 2026 FIFA World Cup has been on the books long enough that you’d think the logistics would be dialed in by now. The U.S. is co-hosting with Canada and Mexico. New Jersey got eight matches at MetLife. It looked like a win. Still does, on paper.

Sen. John Burzichelli, a Democrat from Gloucester County, said what a lot of people in that Statehouse hearing room were probably thinking. “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, and he’s not the first legislator to feel that way. The New Jersey Monitor has been tracking the Penn Station closure details as they’ve surfaced. NJ Transit’s service history during summer months doesn’t exactly inspire confidence that this will go smoothly even under normal conditions, let alone with 40,000 soccer fans bottlenecked through one hub.

Regular commuters didn’t ask for any of this. The person catching the 5:47 out of Penn on the Northeast Corridor to Princeton Junction didn’t vote on the World Cup bid. Neither did the Woodbridge rider squeezing onto a standing-room car after a full day in the city. They’re just trying to get home. This summer, that’s going to be harder.

Kolluri acknowledged the complication without much sugarcoating. The agency’s never run an operation like this before. Nobody in New Jersey has.