MESSAGE
| DATE | 2009-04-08 |
| FROM | Ruben Safir
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| SUBJECT | Subject: [NYLXS - HANGOUT] What the MTA is spending our money on instead of the Subway
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19 Stories Below Manhattan, a 640-Ton Machine Drills a New Train Tunnel
By WILLIAM NEUMAN
Apparently, you don’t need a windshield to drive through a rock wall.
Some 19 stories under the streets of Manhattan on Thursday, the driver
of a 640-ton telescopic tunnel-boring machine stood in a tiny windowless
metal cubicle before a pair of small computer screens and an array of
buttons and gauges.
“No windshield? Don’t need one,†said the driver (or operator, as he
prefers), Anthony Spinoso.
Over several months he has driven the machine 7,700 feet, from a spot
deep under Second Avenue and 63rd Street, through the bedrock, to the
depths beneath Grand Central Terminal, where the tunnel he has helped
dig will someday bring Long Island Rail Road trains to the East Side of
Manhattan.
Now he is backing the machine up several hundred feet to a point where
it will begin boring a parallel tunnel. Another thing that Mr. Spinoso
does not have is a steering wheel. Instead, he guides the movement of
the machine with buttons in front of him, striving to hold a green dot
(his machine) on the computer screen at the center of a narrow yellow
line that represents his programmed course. He must keep the
22-foot-tall, 360-foot-long behemoth on track without varying more than
2 inches in any direction.
“You just push the buttons, it’s like a video game,†said Edward
Kennedy, an engineer helping to supervise the work. “The guy has a
screen with a yellow line on it, the yellow brick road. All he has to do
is keep on the yellow brick road.â€
The digging began last fall for the new Long Island Rail Road tunnels —
there will ultimately be eight tunnel sections feeding into an immense
new station below Grand Central. There are two machines working
simultaneously on separate tunnel sections (the second one, which
started later, has reached 48th Street). They can cut through 100 feet
of rock a day but often move much slower. The tunneling and the
excavation of a huge cavern under Grand Central to house the new station
are expected to be completed in 2012, but the entire project will not be
finished until at least 2015.
The boring is being done for the Metropolitan Transportation Authority
by Dragados Judlau, a joint venture of large construction firms. The
cost of the tunneling is $428 million, but the entire project, which
includes building out the station and laying the tracks, is expected to
cost $7.2 billion. The new tunnels will connect to an existing tunnel
under the East River and from there (via more tunneling) to Long Island
Rail Road tracks in Queens.
A group of reporters and photographers was invited to tour the most
advanced of the tunnel sections on Thursday because it had reached a
milestone by arriving at the area below Grand Central.
Still, much work remains to be done and that includes securing more
financing for the project. The federal government has agreed to provide
$2.7 billion, and an additional $1.7 billion has been earmarked so far
through the transportation authority’s capital spending programs. But
the transportation authority, which is facing grievous budgetary
challenges, must seek an additional $2.8 billion in a new capital
program it will submit to the state next year.
The scene near the end of the tunnel on Thursday was a post-industrial
tableau of rusted metal, snaking ducts and conduit and cable.
The sides of the tunnel were streaked with groundwater in places, dry in
others. The perfectly curved face of the carved rock, a type known as
Manhattan schist, showed the striations left by the machine’s passage.
The rock was a mottled, marbled canvas of greys, blacks and whites, and
it was possible to see the swirls and layers where the once-molten stone
had been squeezed and cooled.
The tunnel was lit by electric lights. The air smelled of diesel fuel
and rock dust. As a group of reporters and photographers slipped and
dodged through the mud, one of the handful of workers mucking about
asked, “Did you bring your sunscreen?â€
--
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