A joint venture of Lane Construction, Schiavone and Dragados has won a $466m contract to build the mile-long New Jersey section of the new Hudson River Tunnel, a twin rail tunnel that will carry trains leaving Secausus Junction rail station in New Jersey under the Hudson River to Penn Station in Manhattan.
It’s the first tunnel boring contract awarded in the larger $16bn Hudson River Tunnel Project (HTP) that will deliver the new Hudson River Tunnel and rehabilitate the 114-year-old North River Tunnels that go under the Hudson a little to the north.
The Gateway Development Commission – the public authority responsible for the HTP – calls HTP the “most urgent infrastructure project in the nation”.
That’s because the old North River Tunnels, which opened in 1910, are a vulnerable choke point for the entire Northeast Corridor, the busiest rail corridor in the US running from Washington, DC in the south through Baltimore, Philadelphia, and New York to Boston in the north. This area represents 20% of the US economy.
The North River Tunnels were damaged in 2012’s Hurricane Sandy and require constant maintenance, causing delays along the whole corridor.
More than 450 trains pass through the tunnels each weekday.
The Commission says that if one of its two single-track tubes had to close, it would cause a 75% reduction in train services along the entire corridor.
When complete in 2038, the HTP will result in four reliable, single-track tubes going under the Hudson instead of two vulnerable ones now.
- Here’s a quick overview of the Hudson River Tunnel Project:
The Palisades section
The Lane JV’s New Jersey section of HTP is called the Palisades Tunnel because it will carry trains for 5,100 feet under the high bluffs on the New Jersey side of the Hudson, called the Palisades, to the river.
Lane, which has a 35% share of the Palisades contract, said its joint venture will deploy two tunnel boring machines (TBMs), with work starting this summer.
The tunnels will be lined with precast concrete rings that have an inside diameter of 25 feet 2 inches.
The JV will build six cross passages, each with a permanent cast-in-situ concrete liner and waterproofing membrane.
The project also involves building the new 120-foot-deep Hoboken Shaft near the river, which will be used to extract the TBMs when digging is complete in 2027.
Two separate contracts for the Hudson River Tunnel are still to be awarded: one will be for under the river and the other for the Manhattan section.
At the beginning of this year a joint venture of Arcadis, Mace, and Parsons was appointed delivery partner for the wider HTP (see further reading).
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Further reading:
