The Post takes NJ Transit train to the World Cup heres how it went

If you’ve read anything before this moment that included the words “World Cup” and “NJ Transit” and “train,” you’d be forgiven for fearing the worst. They want how much for a ticket? They’re keeping other commuters out of parts of Penn Station for how long? And if you got out of the subway at Herald Square early Tuesday afternoon, trying to make your way to MetLife Stadium for a 3 p.m.kickoff between France and Senegal, and saw the line winding down 32nd Street and up Sixth Avenue, you’d be inclined to think it might turn out worse than that. So I’m here to report: The train experience was … fine. At $98, it was eye-watering, to the point of being prohibitively expensive, yes, as nearly everything associated with this World Cup in America seems to be.

But painless, efficient.Pleasant, even. You came away with the sense those two things were almost certainly related. “It’s not too crowded, probably because it’s so expensive,” one pregame passenger remarked. The $98 round-trip fare was down from the initial quote of $150 and then down again from $105 — but still nearly eight times the typical $12.90 to get to Giants-Eagles. Where the local World Cup host committee found the funds to subsidize a $20 shuttle bus service — those tickets were sold out Tuesday, at least on the buses that rowdy Knicks fans hadn’t junked Saturday night — there were no breaks to be had here. The closest parking spots, at the American Dream mall across the road from the stadium, retailed for a whopping $225, but for comparison you have to divide that by the number of passengers in the car. Someone on the train Tuesday said he had booked a parking spot but didn’t use it after hearing horror stories about the delays driving into Saturday’s Brazil-Morocco match. I left at 11:30 a.m.

from my apartment in downtown Manhattan.Twenty-odd minutes on the B train later, I had joined the line of matchgoers — in the colors of both teams, in Kylian...