(The following article by Joe Malinconico was posted on the Newark Star-Ledger website on October 5.)
NEWARK, N.J. — The challenge for transportation officials was daunting — how would they build a new train station deep beneath one of New Jersey’s most densely populated cities?
Getting the trains through was not the problem. The 121-year-old Weehawken rail tunnel through the Palisades was already being used by freight trains and simply needed to be expanded and modernized to carry the trolley-like cars of NJ Transit’s Hudson County light rail system.
But carving out a new underground station and providing a safe, practical way for passengers to get down to it — that would be the hard part.
So they started small, by first drilling a 14-inch hole near Bergenline Avenue in Union City, down through almost 160 feet of solid rock. Then, they slipped a tungsten-steel cutting device down through the hole and slowly pulled it back up, clearing out a wider opening that measured 8 feet, 6 inches.
After that, they set off small explosives to expand the hole to 40 feet in diameter — enough to accommodate three elevators to carry passengers from street-level to the train platforms — as well as emergency stairs.
The $150 million tunnel and station project remains a work in progress and is not scheduled for completion until late next year. When it opens, it will become New Jersey’s first new underground rail station in seven decades.
“How often do you get to work on something like this? A tunnel and a station within a tunnel,” said Steven Santoro, the NJ Transit engineer who is overseeing the project, as he looked down on the construction work in Union City.
“At the beginning of the project, it was thought to be undoable,” said Martin Robins, executive director of Rutgers’ Voorhees Transportation Center. “They felt it would cost too much money, that there was too much rock to go through.”
But there was a strong political push for the Bergenline Avenue station from elected officials in northern Hudson County, especially from Rep. Robert Menendez, who was the mayor of Union City in the late 1980s when the route of the light rail system was being planned.
So the project’s engineers found a way to make the station happen. They modeled their work after a light-rail station in Portland, Ore., that was built within a tunnel, 260 feet below the surface of a hill.
“The payoff is hopefully going to be very high by providing transit access to the North Hudson market,” Robins said. “They’re counting on this being a major station.”
Within five years of its completion, NJ Transit is expecting the Bergenline Avenue station to handle 8,200 riders a day.
But not everyone has great expectations for the tunnel station.
“They should have never gone through the Weehawken Tunnel,” said Al Cafiero, an aide to state Sen. Gerald Cardinale (R-Bergen). “It’s too expensive. It’s not worth it. They should have gone farther north.”
In addition to the $150 million construction cost, NJ Transit also paid $11 million to acquire the property from Conrail and spent another $100 million on road improvements that helped provide an alternate route for the freight trains.
The tunnel is part of a $1.2 billion, 5.1-mile section of the light-rail line that will go from Hoboken Terminal to Tonnelle Avenue in North Bergen after construction is complete. The overall $2.2 billion project would stretch 13 miles from Bayonne to North Bergen. Officials want to expand the line into Bergen County, perhaps up to Tenafly, but they do not have the money for the next phase.
Nothing in the expansion would rival the task of building the system through the Weehawken Tunnel, which was originally constructed in the 1880s. Passenger railroads used the tunnel until the 1950s and then it was a freight route until 2002 when NJ Transit began renovations to accommodate the light-rail project.
The tunnel, about three-quarters of a mile long, had to be widened by several feet to make room for emergency walkways in case riders had to evacuate trains.
In the station area, the expansion of the tunnel was most dramatic. Its width was expanded from 26 feet to 66 feet, its height raised from 20 feet to 32 feet.
More than 50 truckloads of debris were hauled away just from the work done to secure the eastern entrance to the tunnel. During that stage, workers who were lowered on ropes from the top of the Palisades pried loose rocks from the facade with crowbars.
Inside the tunnel, occupational health regulations required that decades of soot from diesel trains had to be cleaned from the walls before construction crews could begin work.
The widening has been completed and the underground station already has taken shape. Next will come the laying of the railroad tracks and the overhead electrical wires to power the trains.
“It’s a complicated job,” said Santoro, “especially because we’re working in such confined space.”