NJ Transit Will Use Old Boonton Line In Secaucus To Run Mass Transit Between Jersey City And MetLife Stadium

SECAUCUS, NJ — Few know this, but NJ Transit plans to reopen the former Boonton railway line between Secaucus Junction and Jersey City, and put some type of mass transit on it.

Just this week, the NJ Transit Board of Directors approved paying HNTB engineering firm $22.2 million to do the design and engineering of what Transit is calling the Secaucus-Meadowlands Transitway.

The idea is to run a mass transit line in between Jersey City, Secaucus Junction train station, cross the Hackensack River at Laurel Hill Park and ultimately connect to the Meadowlands/American Dream. However, the path will definitely not be a train line, NJ Transit officials stressed this week. NJ Transit will not run trains on it.

As Patch previously reported on this, NJ Transit is thinking buses could use the route, or autonomous vehicles, such as a light rail; a monorail similar to the Newark airport monorail or even self-driving cars.

In total, this new transit line will start at Jersey City, stop at Secaucus Junction train station, cross the Hackensack River at Laurel Hill Park along the abandoned Boonton rail tracks and then connect to I-95 near the stadium. The Boonton line is a train line from Montclair to Hoboken/Jersey City and it used to run through southern Secaucus. But NJ Transit stopped running the line in 2002; you can still see where the line used to run next to Harmon Cove Towers; there are old train tracks there.

The line will end at the Meadowlands. The key goal here is to open access to the Meadowlands racetrack, MetLife stadium and American Dream mall. However, this project will not be completed in time for the FIFA World Cup, which MetLife will host this summer. The World Cup is happening too soon; design for the new line only started this week, said NJ Transit.

"The goal of the overall Transitway project is two-fold," said NJ Transit in this press release released Thursday. "The project increases service capacity to more efficiently move more customers between the Meadowlands Sports and Entertainment Complex and Secaucus Junction station. The project will increase capacity to some of the world’s largest events at MetLife Stadium (and) create a brand-new service corridor in one of the most densely populated areas of North Jersey through the adaptive reuse of existing right-of way owned by NJ Transit."

But what about the Essex-Hudson Greenway, a proposed hiking path on old train tracks connecting Montclair to Jersey City?

Separately, there is another movement to turn the former Norfolk Southern Railway freight line tracks into a greenway where people can walk, run or ride their bikes along the nine miles from Montclair to Jersey City. That is called the Essex-Hudson Greenway and it has strong backing from Gov. Phil Murphy, who in 2021 said the state of New Jersey would buy nine miles of the former rail line from Norfolk Southern for $65 million. Murphy held a groundbreaking on the Essex-Hudson Greenway this summer. See this map of the Essex-Hudson Greenway.

The Essex-Hudson Greenway also seeks to use the abandoned Boonton line for their walking/bike path. The railroad path is about 100 feet wide as it crosses the Hackensack.

Can both the Essex-Hudson Greenway and Secaucus-Meadowlands Transitway exist at once? It remains deeply unclear. Backers of the Greenway say yes, but NJ Transit declined to comment this week.

"The idea has always been that the Greenway and what NJ Transit are proposing are compatible," Dene Lee, senior director of the NE Land Program Open Space Institute, a group that backs the Greenway, said in 2021.

Again, NJ Transit declined to comment.

From the Essex-Hudson Greenway groundbreaking this summer: NJ Is Transforming An Abandoned Railway Into A Massive Hiking And Biking Path: The massive hike/bike path will cross through Bloomfield, Belleville, Glen Ridge, Jersey City, Kearny, Montclair, Newark and Secaucus (July 2025)