Rivaling the USS Intrepid in length, but invisible to passers-by or office workers looking out their windows, parallel twin tubes now stretch from 10th to 11th Avenue, just west of Pennsylvania Station. Two stories tall, each of the tubes is large enough to accommodate an Amtrak or New Jersey Transit train, which is what they are intended to do some day in the future.
There has been a lot of talk lately about the multibillion-dollar Gateway project, which would double the rail capacity into and out of Penn Station by adding a two-track tunnel under the Hudson River, and two bridges over the Hackensack River in New Jersey.
But Gateway is more than just talk, as you learn after descending an extension ladder through a hatchway barely big enough to contain you, your safety harness and the ductwork needed to bring fresh air underground.
“Welcome to our cavern,” James McCarron said, his voice resonating down one of the 850-foot-long tubes in a concrete casing underneath the Long Island Rail Road yards on the Far West Side of Manhattan, deep below the platform from which the vast Hudson Yards development is rising.
“Impressive, isn’t it?”
McCarron, 60, the director of design support for Amtrak, is a third-generation mechanical engineer who has seen and helped build some impressive projects. He can scarcely conceal his pride in this one, though.
The tubes, and the casing that envelops them, represent a tangible, $185 million first step in the Gateway project, which is not scheduled to be completed until 2040, at the earliest. So don’t make travel plans just yet.
The casing preserves Amtrak’s right of way through the forest of columns beneath Hudson Yards. And it ensures that a clear path to Penn Station will exist for tracks emerging at West 30th Street from the new Gateway tunnel.
Work on the casing began in late 2013. About 68,000 cubic yards of rock and earth were excavated. (Picture a garbage truck with a capacity of 25 cubic yards. Now picture 2,720 trucks that size.) There are 6,500 tons of steel rebar — so many that they created a nearly solid structure of their own before being encased in 30,000 cubic yards of concrete.
Though the tubes are walled off, the curvature makes it hard to see either end from the center, so it almost feels as if a train could come around the corner.
That will not happen until after a secondary concrete slab is poured inside each tube to create a base for railroad tracks; concrete shoulders, called bench walls, are built on either side of the track bed to contain electrical and mechanical conduits; and catenary wires are strung overhead to carry power.
Today, the loudest noise within the tubes comes from big floor fans. Temperatures are in the upper 50s. The concrete walls glisten with condensation.
It would be easy to lampoon the casing as an expensive “tunnel to nowhere.”
But in an era when infrastructure planning usually involves closing the barn door after the horse has left, and most civil engineering projects go begging for money, it is astonishing that the federal government and private developers have physically preserved a prospective route for a railroad tunnel that is still on the drafting board.
When and if it opens, it will supplement the existing 105-year-old two-tube tunnel. The new tunnel will also allow for the original tubes to be taken out of service to be overhauled and modernized.
“It’s something of a prod to move people forward,” said Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y. Schumer was credited by Amtrak officials and executives of Related Cos., which is building Hudson Yards with Oxford Properties Group, with helping to find the political will and the financial way to take this first step.
A trans-Hudson tunnel called ARC, to be used only by New Jersey Transit, was abruptly halted in 2010 by Gov. Chris Christie, R-N.J., who cited its cost. It was to have run along West 34th Street.
By then, Related had already spent two years planning Hudson Yards in the belief that a new rail line would run north of its site, not directly beneath it.
At that point, it had become clear that Gateway, along West 30th Street, was the only possible trans-Hudson tunnel. Schumer said Amtrak approached him to say that if the right-of-way under Hudson Yards were not protected, the whole Gateway project would jeopardized.
Schumer recalled contacting Stephen M. Ross, the chairman of Related, who told him: “I don’t want to stand in the way. But I have deadlines.” Nonetheless, the senator said, Ross pledged to cooperate with Amtrak in coordinating the complex, simultaneous construction projects.
There was still the matter of finding $185 million, a job that became a bit easier in 2012 after Hurricane Sandy flooded the existing two-tube tunnel under the Hudson, disrupting the lives of about 600,000 New Jersey commuters and intercity travelers for the better part of a week.
“One of the few silver linings of Sandy came along,” Schumer said. That was the Federal Transit Administration’s emergency relief account: It provided the money needed to get the Gateway project going, concretely.
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