Gateway Tunnel Boring Preps Begin in North Bergen as Funding Battles Persist

Work begins on a gargantuan Hudson River tunnel, portending a future for New York’s creaking transport arteries—if all goes according to plan.

At the rumbling edge of North Bergen, New Jersey, a battered slope of blasted rock hints at the ambitions—and anxieties—of America’s largest metropolitan region. Here, engineers for the Gateway Development Commission gathered recently before a 75-foot granite face: the future home of the Gateway Tunnel, a once-in-a-generation infrastructure attempt to stave off gridlock in the rail bottleneck linking New York and New Jersey. “What you’re looking at behind us here is the future portal,” declared James Starace, the commission’s chief of program delivery, gamely conjuring the vision amid a raw tableau of drills, fencing, and exposed stone.

The news is plain: preparations are underway for what will soon be the United States’ most significant passenger rail excavation in decades. The Gateway Tunnel—comprising two bores beneath the Palisades and Hudson River—will supplement, and eventually help replace, the century-old North River Tunnels, a pair of overstressed conduits carrying some 450 trains (and 200,000 passengers) each weekday under the river. In coming months, two 1,700-ton tunnel-boring machines will be lowered behind that 75-foot escarpment, launching the first phase of excavation beneath homes, rock strata, and riverbed.

On paper, the plan is almost elegant. Teams will tunnel through the hard basalt of the Palisades—some sections registering a daunting 35,000psi of compressive strength—before pushing onward beneath Weehawken and then under the Hudson itself. Each boring machine is a mechanical behemoth: 500 feet in length, attended by crews of 30 to 40 professionals, cycling custom-built cutter heads and conveyor belts to chew rock, then slot freshly-poured concrete sections behind. Despite their size, these machines are acutely specialized; “It’s like getting a custom suit,” says Starace. “Every tunnel is a little bit different with material it’s cutting through.”

The implications for New York City cannot be overstated. The existing tunnels, battered by both the inexorable march of time and the storm surges of Hurricane Sandy, are an artifact of early 20th-century engineering now well past their best. Daily, as Amtrak, NJ Transit and others squeeze ever more trains through these narrow pipes, the threat of a catastrophic failure looms—one that would cripple regional mobility, decimate economic output, and set back east-coast commerce. The Gateway Tunnel offers insurance against this most American failing: the underinvestment in infrastructure critical to urban life.

Yet the second-order consequences ripple further. Should the project stay on course—a big “if,” given American public works’ penchant for delay—New York and its region will be buoyed by greater reliability and capacity, potentially luring new residents and jobs back to a commuting corridor battered by two decades of real-estate inflation and, recently, pandemic woes. The construction itself promises blue-collar work: hundreds of trade jobs sustained for years as teams rotate through round-the-clock shifts, replacing tunnel cutters and managing the ballet of logistics between jagged Palisades rock and the silty bed of the Hudson. Still, fiscal wobbles persist. Two lawsuits wind through federal court, seeking to cement stable funding after an episode in February when the Trump administration briefly withheld payments, only to be forced to reimburse the project by judicial decree.

For politicians—Governor Phil Murphy of New Jersey, New York’s Kathy Hochul, and a bipartisan cadre in Congress—Gateway offers a rare opportunity: the chance to preside over a tangible improvement in New Yorkers’ daily lives while gesturing at national renewal. But the path is treacherous. Cost overruns could breed cynicism, as happened with Boston’s “Big Dig.” Delays or, worse, a work-stopping accident would be political poison. Construction risk is nontrivial; boring beneath homes and infrastructure in high-stress rock, then through the saturated mud under the river, taxes even the most advanced civil engineering.

Comparison with peer nations does not flatter. London completed its Crossrail (Elizabeth Line) in 2022, albeit after its own hefty overruns, using similar tunnel-boring technology and moving urban commuters with Teutonic efficiency. Tokyo and Paris have quietly added capacity under their cities for decades. By contrast, Gateway’s projected costs exceed $16 billion—an eye-watering sum, particularly set against the still-uncertain timelines and America’s ramshackle record in delivering large transport projects at speed.

A test for American ambition—and patience

All of which illustrates both the promise and the pathos of American infrastructure. The Gateway Tunnel, when (and if) completed, will barely suffice: it will double cross-Hudson rail capacity, but only to levels London achieved before the Millennium. Yet it is precisely the scale of the pent-up demand, and the city’s sheer density, that makes the project so critical. Closed tunnels, missed trains, and chronic delays corrode the productivity on which New York’s $2 trillion metro economy depends.

In the national context, Gateway is both outlier and harbinger. Its stop-start genesis—dozens of studies, shelved plans, revived visions—mirrors the wider American malaise of governance gridlock and short-termism. Failed efforts have cost not just time and money, but also eroded public confidence in the country’s ability to “build big.” The start of visible, noisy work under the cliffs of Bergen County is, if nothing else, a symbolic turning point.

Some optimism, then, is warranted. The project demonstrates—however haltingly—that Congress, the White House, and local actors can still align to tackle long-term challenges vital to national prosperity. If Gateway can see its tunnel-boring machines grind from granite to the Manhattan schist, perhaps the country’s infrastructure ambitions may be more than just talk.

In the meantime, New Yorkers can inspect the exposed rock in North Bergen and imagine, with restrained hope, the day their creaking commute slips into the background hum of a modern metropolis. For the Gateway project, as for America’s infrastructure at large, seeing is believing. ■