The East River Tunnel Rehabilitation Project is a $1.6 billion Amtrak-led effort to strip two of the four century-old rail tubes under the East River down to their concrete liners and rebuild them with modern track, power, signal, drainage, and fire safety systems.1 Construction began in mid-2025, and the work is scheduled to finish by the end of 2027.
Why the Tunnels Are Being Rebuilt
The four tubes run roughly two and a half miles between Penn Station in Manhattan and Long Island City in Queens, carrying more than 450 daily Amtrak, Long Island Rail Road, and NJ Transit trains. They opened in 1910. By the time serious rehabilitation planning began, the internal systems inside them — bench walls housing electrical conduits, ballasted track, drainage, and signaling — had been decaying for decades.
Superstorm Sandy turned a long-term problem into an urgent one. In October 2012, the storm pushed corrosive saltwater through the tunnels, damaging electrical, signal, and structural systems throughout. The bench walls were crushed over time, and the saltwater accelerated the decay of systems that were already near the end of their useful lives. Temporary repairs kept trains running, but a full reconstruction became unavoidable.
What the Work Covers
Two of the four tubes, designated Line 1 and Line 2, are being demolished internally down to bare concrete and rebuilt from scratch. The concrete liner itself is being patched and spot-repaired where crews find damage.
The original bench walls are being replaced with a modern high-low configuration: a high bench wall on one side and a low bench wall on the other to allow emergency access beneath trains. The new walls incorporate conduits for cables. On Line 2 alone, crews removed roughly 24,000 linear feet of old bench wall, about 20,000 cubic yards of concrete, using robotic demolition machines and hydraulic rock splitters.
The old ballasted track is being replaced with a direct-fixation system that has integrated drainage. Decommissioning Line 2 required removing 24,000 linear feet of running rail, 12,000 linear feet of electrified third rail, 8,000 railroad ties, and 8,000 cubic yards of ballast.
New fire and life safety equipment is going in, including liner heat detection and very early smoke detection systems, along with upgraded emergency egress paths. Crews are also installing new traction power cables, signaling, CCTV cameras, blue light emergency telephones, speakers, radio systems, and an emergency egress pathfinding system. Blocked and deteriorated drainage is being replaced throughout, and two ventilation facilities in Manhattan and Queens are being refurbished.
Above ground, a 60-foot-deep access shaft on 32nd Street in Manhattan provides both construction access and a permanent emergency egress point near the tunnel’s western portal. Two temporary ventilation fans sit at the bottom of the shaft, supplying air without ceiling ductwork that would have conflicted with permanent systems. Building the shaft required coordination with city agencies, the LIRR, NJ Transit, and a nearby hospital, and crews installed a 20-foot-high barricade to work safely next to a live adjacent track. New signal equipment and traction power cables are also being installed on tunnel approaches in Queens and in Sunnyside Yard.
Timeline and Current Status
The work is phased so that only one of the four tubes is closed at a time, leaving three available for rail traffic.
- Spring 2024: Construction contract awarded.
- Summer 2024: Preliminary construction began in Sunnyside Yard.
- May 23, 2025: Line 2 was taken out of service. The original May 9 target was pushed back after the MTA told Amtrak that a related eastbound reroute project was running six months behind.
- June 2, 2025: Full construction inside Line 2 began.
- February 2026: Track installation began inside Line 2.
- Summer 2026: Line 2 is scheduled to reopen, with recent updates projecting early August 2026.
- Fall 2026: Line 1 is scheduled to close for its own 13-month rehabilitation.
- End of 2027: Anticipated project completion.
As of June 2026, Amtrak reported the project remained on schedule, with Line 2 in its final stage of reconstruction and moving toward service restoration.
The rebuilt tubes are designed to remain in service for another 100 years.
Service Impacts While Work Is Underway
Closing one of four tubes reduces Penn Station’s East River capacity by 25 percent. With only three tubes running, a minor incident in any open tube can cascade into severe disruptions across all three railroads that use them.
To manage the disruption, the LIRR rerouted about a dozen trains to Grand Central Madison and Atlantic Terminal. Amtrak added around-the-clock engineering coverage, more frequent track inspections, and rescue equipment staged in the remaining open tubes. Amtrak, the LIRR, and NJ Transit coordinated service plans with oversight from the Federal Railroad Administration.
Amtrak’s own Empire Service between New York and Albany lost two daily round trips. A southbound train departing Albany at 12:10 p.m. and a northbound train departing Penn Station at 3:15 p.m. were eliminated, and the Maple Leaf and Adirondack trains were combined into a single train between Penn Station and Albany, creating longer layovers. Steve Strauss of the Empire State Passengers Association put the cuts at a 23 percent reduction in train frequencies when a previously removed round trip from November 2024 is included. Amtrak committed to adding extra cars to the remaining ten daily round trips to maintain overall seat capacity.
Who Is Paying and Who Is Building
A $1.26 billion federal grant from the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, awarded by the Federal Railroad Administration in November 2023, provides most of the funding. Amtrak, the MTA, and NJ Transit cover the remainder. An earlier dispute over $432 million in federal Sandy recovery money was resolved when Senator Chuck Schumer brokered a deal in which Amtrak agreed to provide $500 million to help the MTA connect Metro-North Railroad to Penn Station, and the MTA redirected its Sandy grant funds to the tunnel work.
Amtrak awarded the $637 million construction contract to the Skanska E-J ERT Joint Venture, a partnership between Skanska USA Civil and E-J Electric Installation Co., in July 2024. A joint venture of STV Inc. and Naik Consulting Group is the construction manager, and Jacobs Engineering Group provided the design. The project operates under a Project Labor Agreement tied to a 2021 memorandum of understanding between Amtrak and North America’s Building Trades Unions.
The Shutdown Versus Repair-in-Place Dispute
The most contentious element of the project was not engineering but method. For years, MTA leadership and New York Governor Kathy Hochul pushed Amtrak to adopt a “repair in place” approach, performing work during nights and weekends while keeping the tubes open for daytime service. Amtrak insisted a full tube shutdown was the only workable method for a project of this scope.
MTA Chairman Janno Lieber pointed to the MTA’s own post-Sandy work, saying the agency had rehabilitated nine subway tunnels without full shutdowns by mounting cables on racks rather than encasing them in rebuilt concrete bench walls. Lieber called Amtrak “too hide-bound” and said, “I’m not giving up these hard-won gains for on-time performance for Long Islanders because Amtrak is too hide-bound to consider a different way of performing work.” LIRR President Rob Free compared Amtrak’s arguments for the shutdown to those of a “used car salesman.” The MTA Board passed a formal resolution calling on Amtrak to reconsider.
In an April 2025 letter to Amtrak President Roger Harris, Hochul urged Amtrak to abandon the full shutdown and accused the agency of “backtracking” on earlier commitments to restore suspended trains and add coach cars to the Empire Service. “Enough is enough,” she said.
Amtrak did not change course. In a May 6, 2025, response, Harris defended the full-shutdown approach as the “safest, most efficient, reliable, and timely” method and called the alternative “an expensive, short-term band-aid and a disservice to passengers and taxpayers.” He said the plan had been “thoroughly vetted and agreed upon by MTA, NJ Transit, Amtrak and the Federal Railroad Administration.” Amtrak’s Executive Vice President for Capital Project Delivery, Laura Mason, said the MTA had been involved in funding, design sign-off, and procurement for years. The MTA went along with the plan after failing to persuade Amtrak to change it. Congressman Mike Lawler also called on the Trump Administration to intervene.
How It Fits With Gateway and Future Capacity
The East River Tunnel work is a standalone project, separate from the Gateway Program, which addresses the Hudson River crossing between New Jersey and Penn Station. Gateway’s Phase 1 includes a new Hudson River tunnel, rehabilitation of the existing Hudson tunnel, and replacement of the Portal Bridge. The two efforts address opposite ends of Penn Station’s tunnel infrastructure.
Both are part of what Amtrak has described as its largest ever capital program to modernize the Northeast Corridor. The rebuilt East River tubes are also designed for future use: once the MTA’s Penn Station Access project is complete, Metro-North Railroad trains will use the East River Tunnels to reach Penn Station for the first time, adding a fourth railroad to the tubes’ users.