Herald interns get firsthand look at LIRR’s East Side Access Project

As part of their internships at Herald Community Newspapers this past summer, two Hofstra University students and one Duke University student donned hardhats and rubber boots and headed underground –– 120 feet underground.

Fran Berkman, a Hofstra graduate journalism student, Shannon Pandaliano, a Hofstra senior majoring in English and publishing, and Alex Krinsky, a Duke junior majoring in public-policy studies, toured the Long Island Rail Road’s East Side Access Project, a $7.3 billion set of tunnels that is now under construction and will eventually connect Long Island with Grand Central Terminal. It is the largest capital project now under way in the United States, and the LIRR’s biggest in a century.

Leading the tour were Dr. Michael Horodniceanu, president of MTA Capital Construction, and Alan Paskoff, senior vice president of MTA Capital Construction. Also on the tour were a group of Herald Community Newspaper executives and editors, including Publishers Cliff and Stuart Richner, Executive Editor John O’Connell, who supervised Pandaliano this summer, and Senior Editor Scott Brinton, an adjunct professor in Hofstra’s Graduate Journalism Program who supervised Berkman and Krinsky.

The tour was intended, in part, to give the Hofstra interns a chance to witness history in the making while giving them the opportunity to meet with and ask questions of high-level sources such as Horodniceanu and Paskoff.

The tour through the project’s dark and dusty caverns began in the morning, in Long Island City, Queens, where the MTA is boring underneath Amtrak’s Sunnyside Yard west toward the 63rd Street Tunnel, which runs below the East River, just north of the Queensborough Bridge. At 63rd and Park in Manhattan, the new LIRR tunnels head south to Grand Central Terminal at 42nd Street, where trains will arrive and depart on eight platforms, and passengers will enter and exit Grand Central Terminal via a 180-foot-long escalator.

After a brief lunch stop at Grand Central Terminal, the tour continued on the Manhattan side in the afternoon. Horodniceanu said that 1,500 workers, who call themselves “sand hogs,” are on the job to complete the project by 2016. At times, that number can swell to 2,000.

For more, see

http://www.liherald.com/merrick/merrick/stories/LIRR-realizing-a-long-held-dream-with-East-Side-Access-tunnels,34657?page=1&content_source.

Herald interns spent the summer writing community-based stories and fact-checking the Heralds' community guides, published annually from August to October.