Friday, July 11, 2025
For passengers on every Long Island Rail Road train bound for Penn Station, the final six minutes are a pitch-black journey below ground through one of four submerged tubes known as the East River Tunnels. Beginning Friday, Amtrak is scheduled to launch a $1.6 billion, three-year overhaul of two of the four tunnels most battered by Superstorm Sandy.
Swamped by corrosive floodwater during the 2012 storm, the aging tubes are now structurally compromised. Amtrak plans to take them offline one at a time.
But stakeholders — from the Metropolitan Transportation Authority to Gov. Kathy Hochul — warn that fewer transit lines could mean logistical havoc for the 461 LIRR trains that flow in and out of Manhattan each business day. The long-delayed project will slash tunnel capacity by 25 percent.
Long Island Rail Road President Robert Free warned that Amtrak’s plan poses “significant risks,” cautioning that even a minor glitch in one of the three remaining tunnels could trigger major service disruptions systemwide.
“This is about, above all else, protecting service for hundreds of thousands of Long Island Rail Road riders whose transportation is being put at risk by Amtrak’s failure to plan for their tunnel megaproject,” Free said in a statement.
The MTA has urged Amtrak to limit tunnel closures to nights and weekends to protect weekday rush-hour traffic — dubbed “repair in place” — but Amtrak has refused. Instead, one tunnel at a time will remain out of commission at all hours for the duration of the project.
Amtrak defended its decision, saying that after reviewing a number of options with the MTA and NJ Transit — including the MTA’s favored “repair in place” method — it settled on a plan it says is the “safest, most efficient, and reliable” for fully restoring two of the tunnels.
The rail operator also swiped back against MTA’s accusation of ineptitude, noting that the transit agency approved the project months ago, and accused it of delaying the start by more than seven months due to its own unfinished Eastbound Re-Route work.
Amtrak’s statement also politely shrugged off Hochul’s urging to “take a hard look at its construction plans and ensure access to reliable train travel throughout this key corridor.”
“We have been actively working with the MTA to mitigate the impact of this delay on the East River Tunnel project, including finding ways to shorten the overall outage,” Amtrak President Roger Harris said.
Although the current tube slated for repair is mainly used by Amtrak, shifting all traffic to the remaining three shared tubes could heighten the risk of packed trains, cascading delays and rush-hour logjams for LIRR commuters.
The LIRR has released updated timetables for service this month.
Questions still loom as to how Amtrak plans to bolster the remaining tunnel infrastructure during the outage — or what safeguards and oversight mechanisms are in place to manage the disruptions in real time.
Amtrak noted that while emergency repairs have kept trains running, the infrastructural backbone of the transit system has steadily weakened. The repairs that will soon get underway are more vital than ever, even if they come with the potential for serious disruption headaches.
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