By Brenda Flanagan
Correspondent
Alarming photos of the 100-year-old Hudson River train tunnels. A new engineering report shows cracks, crumbling concrete, exposed steel supports and leaks. It’s old age, plus corrosion from Sandy’s sea water storm surge. To fix it, Amtrak says, requires closing one tunnel for an entire year and squeezing all trains into one tunnel.
“It’s terrible. It’s just a bad idea,” said one woman.
That’s because 450 trains a day — mostly NJ Transit — travel these tunnels.
“If you don’t get on one train, you gotta wait for the next one. It’s gonna be delays like crazy,” said one man.
“They should find another route, I guess. Find some other way? Yeah. The trains are already as bad as they are. They’re delayed every day,” said another man.
To repair the worst problems, Amtrak says it’s currently closing one tunnel at a time for a few hours each weekend. It’s a band-aid. Shutting down one of the tunnels entirely.
“I think what we’re hearing Amtrak is a few years away from any serious work. We’ll have to be part of that planning process,” said Executive Director Ronnie Hakim.
For a long-term fix, three plans surfaced. First, properly repairing the tunnels one at a time, including everything from pressure wash to track repair, could run $689 million. Amtrak’s Gateway Project would build two brand new tunnels and a new terminal and cost from $10 billion to $14 billion, keeping both old tunnels open. Here’s an alternative — build and open one new tunnel for about $1.5 billion, then repair the old tunnels one at a time.
“They do need work and it’d be a lot easier if you had a third tunnel,” said Joe Clift.
Clift’s the LIRR’s former director of planning and says his idea’s less expensive and keeps two tunnels going all the time.
“Instead of working on the weekends like they do today, you could just have it out of service for a whole three, nine, 10 months, whatever,” he said.
Amtrak says the one-tunnel plan “…will not result in meaningful capacity improvements…nor represent a wise investment of scarce public resources.” As for the ARC Tunnel — the Trans-Hudson project killed in 2010 by Gov. Chris Christie — critics claim that could’ve been an alternative tunnel during repairs.
“With all due respect to Gov. Christie, he made a a mistake in pulling out of that project,” said New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio.
“The ARC tunnels wouldn’t have done anything for them. They were deep underground, going into Macy’s Basement Station,” Clift said.
So with plans and price tags TBA — and who’ll pay for what still undecided — repairs schedules resemble the trains, delayed.