NORTH BERGEN, N.J. — With a wall of solid rock behind him, James Starace, chief of program delivery for the Gateway Development Commission, stood Tuesday in a trench cut into the hills across the Hudson River from Manhattan. A crew of about 40 workers will oversee the fully automated “underground factory,” he said, as the massive machines — armed with cutters harder than diamonds — chew through the dense Palisades rock.
The twin tunnel-boring machines, each nearly the length of two football fields, arrived “like Lego pieces” from Germany in almost 100 separate components, said Hamed Nejad, the project’s chief engineer. Outside the future tunnel entrance, welders fused segments of the cutterheads as sparks flew.
Excavation of the first section is expected to take about a year once digging begins, Starace said, advancing roughly 30 feet of tunnel per day. Later phases will send additional machines under the riverbed. When complete, the new two-track tunnel will stretch nearly 2.5 miles and, together with the renovation of the original tube — damaged by saltwater during Superstorm Sandy — is intended to ease a chronic bottleneck on the busiest passenger rail corridor in the nation. The commission projects trains will speed in and out of the tunnel by 2035.
The ambitious infrastructure effort secured key approvals and funding during the Biden administration, but it came close to a shutdown earlier this year. During a federal government funding lapse, the Trump administration froze the project’s money, citing concerns that funds were being allocated based on diversity, equity, and inclusion principles. As cash reserves neared depletion, a federal judge in February ordered the administration to release the funds. Financing has continued to flow while a lawsuit brought by New York and New Jersey against the federal government works its way through the courts.
Danny Pearlstein, a spokesperson for the transit advocacy group Riders Alliance, said the country has grown unaccustomed to building megaprojects of this scale, which has contributed to the cost. “What’s astonishing about Gateway isn’t the size and scope of the project,” Pearlstein said, “but that it’s taken this long to get only so far.”