America’s biggest mass transit construction project in generations is to begin during June 2009 with earth-moving machinery constructing an underpass beneath busy highway routes 1 & 9. The work will mark the start of an eight-year, $8.7 billion effort to build the first rail tunnels under the Hudson River in a century and the first link of any kind between New Jersey and Manhattan since the lower deck of the George Washington Bridge opened in 1962.

Known as Access to the Region’s Core, or ARC, it is an undertaking nearly as immense as the construction of the two existing tunnels which the new tubes will augment. It will employ thousands of people, many working deep underground in round-the-clock shifts. Tunnel-boring machines longer than football fields will chew their way through hard rock and silt 30 metres beneath the surface of the river.

In Manhattan, the tunnels will end deep below 34th Street in a new two-tiered station stretching over half a kilometre, from Sixth to Eighth Avenue, giving passengers access to 14 subway lines, PATH trains and the Long Island Rail Road.

When complete in 2017, the project will ease commuting for hundreds of thousands living west of the river in New Jersey, speeding service, creating more transfer-free trips and encouraging motorists to abandon jammed roads in favour of trains.

Building the new tunnels will create work for an estimated 44,000, many of them from New Jersey. According to planning studies, 89% of new growth in the city draws workers from the west.

The existing tunnels reached capacity nearly ten years ago, creating a bottleneck for the trains that run to and from Penn Station along the north-east corridor, the most congested stretch of track in the USA. During peak periods, 23 trains pass through the tunnels every hour.

When the new bores are completed, NJ Transit and Amtrak will increase the number of trains crossing the river to 34 per hour during peak periods. That number will gradually rise to a maximum of 48 per hour by 2030, when ridership is projected to be nearly 60% higher than it is today.

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