Tunnel Boring Begins on the $16 Billion Hudson Tunnel Project
The Gateway Program's first tunnel boring machines are being commissioned in North Bergen, marking a major milestone for the aging Hudson River rail crossing.
Every weekday, roughly 200,000 rail commuters pass through century-old tubes under the Hudson River that were never meant to last this long. The Hudson Tunnel Project, the centerpiece of the broader $16 billion Gateway Program, is the long-delayed answer, and this year it moved from planning documents to steel in the ground.
Manufacturing and testing of the first two tunnel boring machines was completed this spring, and boring itself is beginning in North Bergen, New Jersey — the staging point from which the machines will chew through rock toward Manhattan. It’s a genuinely enormous undertaking: a new pair of tunnels running beneath the river, built without interrupting the existing century-old tubes that Amtrak and NJ Transit still depend on every day.
What makes projects like this hard isn’t really the boring itself — tunnel boring machines are, by now, a mature and well-understood technology, as comfortable cutting through bedrock as through sandy fill. The hard part is sequencing: keeping the existing tunnels running at full capacity throughout construction, coordinating between agencies and jurisdictions on both sides of the river, and doing it all on a schedule measured in years rather than election cycles.
If it stays on track, the new tunnels are expected to let the aging originals finally go offline for the rehabilitation they’ve needed for years, rather than continuing to run at full capacity indefinitely. For a piece of infrastructure this critical, “finally getting a spare” is its own kind of milestone.