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May 12, 2022

Amtrak Forces Improve Safety, Reliability in North River Tunnel

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Amtrak personnel recently spent a series of consecutive weekends in March 2022 remediating damage to the benchwall system in the South Tube of the North River Tunnel that maximized efficiency without interrupting regular train service.

Over the course of a 55-hour weekend outage, when more invasive work could be performed without impacting service, crews jackhammered away loose and unstable concrete from the walking surface, poured and set fresh concrete, and retrofit a below-surface splicing chamber into which crews must climb to repair damaged sections of the 12,000-volt feeder cables that run through the tunnel’s benchwalls. Workers have also been injecting grout into the tunnel’s concrete liner to redirect infiltrating ground water and minimize the frequency of infrastructure failures like signal problems and poor track conditions.

The work is part of an approximate $150 million investment in a series of interim improvements that Amtrak is making in the more than a century-old tunnel while construction of a new Hudson River Tunnel advances as part of the Gateway Program.

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Crews use a jackhammer to loosen and remove unstable concrete on the benchwall during a recent 55-hour weekend outage in the more than a century-old North River Tunnel.

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Crews use a jackhammer to loosen and remove unstable concrete on the benchwall during a recent 55-hour weekend outage in the more than a century-old North River Tunnel.

Fresh concrete is poured into a form and allowed to set during the course of a weekend work period. Longer duration maintenance windows are required to perform this type of work.

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Fresh concrete is poured into a form and allowed to set during the course of a weekend work period. Longer duration maintenance windows are required to perform this type of work.

Grout is injected into surface cracks in the concrete liner of the more than a century-old North River Tunnel as part of leak mitigation efforts under the NRT Interim Reliability program.

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Grout is injected into surface cracks in the concrete liner of the more than a century-old North River Tunnel as part of leak mitigation efforts under the NRT Interim Reliability program.

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