Workers inside one of the Hudson River rail tunnels. (Courtesy of Amtrak)
Every night, about 20 to 30 workers head inside the rail tunnels under the Hudson River to make sure New Jersey commuters can make it safely in and out of Manhattan.
They eyeball the decaying 115-year-old tunnels, which for more than a decade have been slated to be augmented by new tunnel projects, and make sure they are clear and passable.
Officials in both states want the old tunnels, which opened during the Taft administration, supplemented with newer tubes. While the $16 billion project to build those tunnels, sometimes called the most important infrastructure project in the nation, is a cause celebre, not much is ever said about the current tunnels and the daily cause of making sure the 450 or so trains daily servicing more than 200,000 riders can pass through them.
The failure of even one of the two tubes would be a catastrophe for the entire northeast, but especially New York and northern New Jersey.
“We are not at a critical failure point yet. We could be if we don’t keep up with our maintenance and demands, but we are not yet at that point,” said David Albright, Amtrak’s assistant division engineer for fire and life safety.
He added: “Because we spend time in there, and we do a lot of preventative maintenance, we are in a good state of repair.”
Albright leads the team of workers who inspect the tunnels, two tubes that connect New Jersey to New York Penn Station, the nation’s busiest train transit hub, as well as the four tubes under the East River that also service NJ Transit by providing it with a connection to the Sunnyside Yards in Queens, where trains bound for the Garden State are staged. The tunnels form a critical link that ties together not only Amtrak’s northeast corridor, but also NJ Transit and the Long Island Rail Road’s commuter service.
Amtrak calls them the North River tunnels, a vestige of the days that ended in the 17th century when the region was controlled by the Dutch. They called the Hudson the North River, and the Delaware was called the South River.
Both tunnels are decrepit and in danger of not being passable. Albright’s team maintains and potentially upgrades the performance of these tunnels while waiting out the almost-decade it will take for them to be augmented with the two new tubes, called the Gateway project.
“When you have 115-year-old infrastructure, you are going to see failure points,” Albright said.
His job often entails going into the tunnels and looking for cracks and fissures, or evidence of decay. In addition to his regular title, Albright is co-chair of the New York Penn Station and tunnel system emergency response task force.
It didn’t help matters that, when the region was hit in October 2012 by Hurricane Sandy, the tunnels were inundated with up to six feet of salt water. Though the water is long gone, its corrosive power is still felt 13 years later and likely to continue for years more, causing disintegration of the largely concrete tubes.
“Overall Amtrak’s goal is to not change any train service,” he said “They want to maintain the same level of service, the same on-time service that we currently provide. And still update our infrastructure.”
The digging of the new tunnels is an infrastructure project that never quite fades from the news. An earlier version was shut down by then-Gov. Chris Christie in 2010, who cited potential cost overruns. And during the recent federal government shutdown, President Donald Trump said he had terminated “the project in New York,” largely believed to be a reference to Gateway and/or the 2nd Avenue subway project.
Stephen Sigmund, a spokesman for the Gateway Development Commission, a bi-state agency that represents the interests of the two states in expediting the project, said Gateway remains on track to be completed in 2035.
Evidence of the project may be seen on Tonnelle Avenue, where a roadway bridge in North Bergen is being built that will carry Routes 1&9 over the tracks leading to the new tunnel. To the east, work is underway on the Palisades Tunnel, preparing the site for building the first mile of new tunnel with state-of-the-art boring machines. Such a machine is scheduled to arrive there in early 2026.
Overhead bridge and utility relocations have commenced at Tonnelle, and in New York, the construction of concrete casing in the Hudson Yards train yard has begun, according to Amtrak.
Sigmund said the project is “on scope, schedule, and budget.”
Albright said he and his team are responsible for all the maintenance in the existing tunnels except for maintaining the tracks and the electronic traction system, which you may know from outside the tunnels as the catenary wires that feed power to the trains. Those are handled by a different engineering team at Amtrak. Amtrak is responsible for maintenance along the northeast corridor route for both NJ Transit and its own trains.
Albright’s team is responsible for maintaining the “benchwalls,” which are the concrete walls of each tube. The tunnel walls are about two feet thick, and they are constructed of reinforced concrete and steel.
These tunnels are the only way for Amtrak and NJ Transit trains to get in and out of Manhattan, noted Amtrak spokesman Jason Abrams. That makes it different from elsewhere in the coast-to-coast Amtrak system. In other places, trains can be rerouted around a problem spot.
The walls carry all the electronic components that control the signaling, Albright said. The catenary system was severely damaged by the Sandy infiltration and is in need of an overhaul.
Abrams said the railroad has installed flood doors outside the tubes to ward off any further inundation caused by a new storm.
Permanent repairs for the existing tunnels must wait until the middle of the next decade, when the first of the new tunnels is placed into service. At that time, one of the existing tubes will be taken out of service for the year and a half it will take to fully renovate it. Then it’s the other tube’s turn.
Other entities, notably New York’s police and fire departments and North Hudson Regional Fire and Rescue, also have teams that examine the tunnels, Albright said.
Albright and his team are also responsible for keeping passable the emergency evacuation system that hopefully no one ever has to use.
“We have egress door, ventilation shafts, there are also some passages that go between the two tunnels” that at its deepest is about 90 feet from the surface of the river, he said. “That could be detrimental to some of our riding public, to have to go up those stairs in emergencies.”
He said Amtrak’s goal is first to send in a rescue engine to push or pull a stalled train out.
The White House has not clarified Trump’s remarks from October on the Gateway project’s potential termination. And Gateway itself is not commenting on that threat.
“We have, and continue to, decline comment on the President’s remarks from October,” Sigmund said.
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