Increased capacity into NYC

That new Hudson River tunnel is on the way, someday. The Times Herald Record reports on an improvement that will more than double the number of trains that can reach the Big Apple.

Times Herald-Record

Newark — Preliminary engineering for the new Hudson River rail tunnel and Midtown train station has advanced to the point where design modifications are necessary to reflect what’s really above and below ground.

As a result, NJ Transit and the Port Authority said yesterday that they will issue a supplemental environmental impact study on the $7.5 billion project known as Access to the Region’s Core, or ARC, in the coming weeks and schedule another round of public hearings in November.

“We’ve kept every single customer-passenger benefit that was ever thought of as part of this project,” said Art Silber, the project chief, in detailing the changes.

The project’s marquee benefit will be to boost rail capacity to Manhattan to 48 trains an hour from the 23 an hour that can squeeze through Amtrak’s 100-year-old tunnel to Pennsylvania Station. The new tunnel also means a one-seat ride to the city for commuters from Orange, Rockland, Bergen and Passaic counties, eliminating transfers at Secaucus and shaving 15 minutes off the trip.

The most significant design modification involves putting the tunnel and the new station another 40 to 50 feet beneath Manhattan to circumvent a virtual obstacle course: sensitive dredging and filling at the river’s edge, removing and reassembling a historic bulkhead, plowing through the Hudson River Park and the West Side Highway and running into the new tunnel for the extension of the No. 7 subway line.

Filed under: Regional USA Passenger Rail