(The following story by Mark Ginocchio appeared on the Stamford Advocate website on November 26.)
NEW YORK — At 63rd Street and 2nd Avenue on the East Side of Manhattan, you’ll find community gardens. But 160 feet below the gravel parking lot and work sheds, you’ll find the real action.
There, at the bottom of 16 flights of stairs, a cavern slated to connect the East Side at Grand Central Terminal to commuter trains coming from Long Island and Queens is taking shape foot by foot.
At $6.3 billion, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s East Side Access project is one of the most ambitious rail initiatives in the tri-state region, connecting two of the country’s busiest commuter railroads.
Once the project is complete in 2013, more than 25,000 feet of bedrock will be excavated and a third level will be added to Grand Central beneath the lower level occupied by Metro-North Railroad’s trains and commuters.
“This is a straightforward project. We’re digging four holes in the ground,” said Sal Calvaniro, a contracted member of the East Side construction team. “And we’re doing all this without impacting existing service.”
The MTA is far enough along on the first of the tunnels that it is opening the cavern to select audiences, mostly the media and other MTA employees eager to see the project.
New tunnels will be constructed from the Long Island Railroad’s mainline tracks in Queens under Amtrak’s Sunnyside yard and the LIRR’s existing rail yard, connecting to the 63rd Street tunnel just outside Northern Boulevard.
The first of the four tunnels is being bored from a structure at 63rd Street and 2nd Avenue, running west and south under Park Avenue and Metro-North’s four-track right-of-way. It will end at a storage area at 38th street in midtown Manhattan.
The tunnel is 22 feet in diameter, lined with shoe-grabbing mud that cakes the underground workers in shades of tan and gray. Near the top of the tunnel, a large yellow tube supplies fresh air.
For breaks, the workers created a makeshift cafeteria, platformed above the muck and the puddles, complete with picnic tables, water coolers, a microwave, a coffee pot and cans of evaporated milk.
Since the contract was awarded last year, about 700 feet of the tunnel has been excavated at a rate of about 70 feet a day, Calvaniro said. Their personal best is 83 feet in a day.
“We’re really still in the start-up phase,” he said.
The first tunnel should be complete in the spring.
It will take more than elbow grease to get the project done. The MTA imported two tunnel boring machines that are 22 feet in diameter. The $14 million machines have more than 300 feet of trailing equipment and weigh more than 700 tons each.
The huge machines were moved underground in parts and put back together on site, Calvaniro said.
Behind one of the machine’s cutters, ground-up stone drops onto a conveyor belt, where it is moved under the East River into Queens and deposited.
The work is dangerous, though the boring machines help workers stay safer than those who dug tunnels 30 or 40 years ago, Calvaniro said.
Among those working on water tunnels in the 1970s, about one fatality occurred for each mile excavated, Calvaniro said.
“We’ve come a long way,” he said. “This is significantly less dangerous. Not to say accidents don’t happen, but we don’t expect any fatalities.”