{"id":50210,"date":"2025-07-09T01:54:08","date_gmt":"2025-07-09T01:54:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/50210\/"},"modified":"2025-07-09T01:54:08","modified_gmt":"2025-07-09T01:54:08","slug":"five-gateway-construction-sites-work-toward-2035-completion","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/50210\/","title":{"rendered":"Five Gateway construction sites work toward 2035 completion"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>It may be just another road in New Jersey to some, but you could call a brand new underpass in North Bergen the gateway to the Gateway Tunnel.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cWe\u2019re building an underpass so that the tunnel boring machines can actively go back and forth underneath Tonnelle Avenue,\u201d said John Schweppenheiser, a construction manager with Niak Consulting, one of many contractors on the Gateway Tunnel project.<\/p>\n<p><b>What You Need To Know<\/b><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Last July, the Gateway Program Development Commission secured the last piece of the $16 billion in federal funding to build the second tunnel under the Hudson to provide more reliable rail service between New York, New Jersey and beyond<\/li>\n<p><\/p>\n<li>There are 10 construction sites, five now active, two already completed under Hudson Yards and one under the Hudson<\/li>\n<p><\/p>\n<li>Much of the work is done around and under active roads, highways, utilities, the LIRR West Side Rail Yard and the High Line, which had to be suspended on concrete girders and requires constant structural monitoring\u00a0<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<ul>\n<li>Other challenges include hardening the far West Side bulkhead of Manhattan, which is landfill, and removing obstructions like what was left from the elevated West Side Highway steel foundations<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><b data-rte-class=\"rte-temp\"><\/b><\/p>\n<p>It\u2019s actually U.S. 1 and 9, the busiest non-tolled road in the state.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cWe had to build this in stages to maintain the vehicular traffic on Tonnelle Avenue. [It was] very, very important that we did not impact traffic,\u201d Schweppenheiser said.<\/p>\n<p>This is just one of 10 different construction sites, five now active, that make up the Gateway Tunnel Project. It was only a year ago the final piece of the $16 billion in federal funding was secured to finish it.<\/p>\n<p>Overseeing it all, former MTA Chair and CEO Tom Prendergast.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cThis is money from New York. It represents, you know, people\u2019s livelihood,\u201d Prendergast said. \u201cBut the most important thing is it\u2019s a project that is going to increase the reliability of the service into Penn Station from New Jersey. Actually, the entire station.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>But there is still plenty of work to do before that, requiring a lot of coordination between different contractors and sections.<\/p>\n<p>North Bergen is where the tunnel boring machines will make their way through the Jersey Palisades next year to Weehawken, where different machines will be sent down a shaft to start tunneling under the river.<\/p>\n<p>Those will then bore through a concrete box being built inside a coffer dam where the riverbed consistency is too soft, through to the Manhattan bulkhead, another challenging area made from landfill that also has to be stabilized.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cThey\u2019ll circulate cold brine through these pipes to freeze the ground, to create a hardened mass,\u201d Benjamin Engle, senior program manager for Program Planning at the Gateway Development Commission, said.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cThey\u2019ll excavate the material. They\u2019ll remove obstructions that are within Route 9A, 12th Avenue, including the former foundations, steel foundations of the West Side Highway that were abandoned in place when they tore the highway down,\u201d he continued.<\/p>\n<p>The tunnel will connect to the Hudson Yards Concrete Casing across 30th Street, where a trench will gradually lead the tunnel up to the elevation of Penn Station.<\/p>\n<p>While the tunnel project itself is massive and complicated, making it even more difficult is having to work around active utilities, streets, highways and even an active train yard.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cWe had to support the Long Island Rail Road substation, which supplies all of the power for the West Side storage yard, which is a major key hub for MTA Long Island Rail Road,\u201d Leroy Antoine, project manager for Hudson Yards Concrete Casing 3, said. \u201cWe have several instrumentation and monitoring points all throughout the site.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Even the High Line posed a challenge.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cWe had to underpin the High Line,\u201d Antoine said. \u201cWhich is, essentially, support the High Line while we dug underneath it.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>This portion will be finished at the end of 2026. The tunnel itself will open in 2035.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"It may be just another road in New Jersey to some, but you could call a brand new&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":50211,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5122],"tags":[5229,7448,23953,405,403,50,5226,5225,5228,5227,37965,52,26304,11900,67,586,132,5230,68,2969,5284],"class_list":{"0":"post-50210","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-new-york","8":"tag-america","9":"tag-app-top-stories","10":"tag-app-traffic-transit","11":"tag-new-york","12":"tag-new-york-city","13":"tag-news","14":"tag-newyork","15":"tag-newyorkcity","16":"tag-ny","17":"tag-nyc","18":"tag-samantha-liebman","19":"tag-top-stories","20":"tag-traffic-and-transit","21":"tag-transit","22":"tag-united-states","23":"tag-united-states-of-america","24":"tag-unitedstates","25":"tag-unitedstatesofamerica","26":"tag-us","27":"tag-usa","28":"tag-vod"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/114820786747382243","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/50210","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=50210"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/50210\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/50211"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=50210"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=50210"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=50210"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}