The 800-foot-long, 35-foot-deep concrete trench could someday lead to two new commuter rail tunnels under the Hudson River to New Jersey, if the billions needed to build them ever materialize.
The access tunnel is being built now because the massive Hudson Yards development with six skyscrapers, the tallest being 80 stories, will soon be built on top of it. Trying to dig such a huge trench through the bedrock after those buildings are completed, officials say, would be an engineering and financial nightmare.
https://ca.finance.yahoo.com/news/nyc-185m-tunnel-leads-nowhere-now-built-still-060902130.htmlThe access tunnel is expected to be completed in fall 2015.
Currently, there are two tunnels, opened in 1910, between New York's Penn Station and Newark, N.J., and they are unable to accommodate any more trains. They also flooded during Superstorm Sandy in 2012.
Any kind of breakdown or glitch in the tunnels can lead to huge delays for the 250,000 people who use Penn Station every day to ride NJ Transit and Amtrak.
"There's an urgent need to expand capacity between New York and New Jersey," says Craig Schulz, spokesman for Amtrak, whose trains serving the Northeast corridor between Washington and Boston are often packed, with ridership growing.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Access_to_the_Region's_Core, http://www.tstc.org/arc
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