For years, I was a frequent train traveler between New York City and Washington, D.C., and I once loved the ease of riding the rails between the two urban centers. But with each passing trip, the travel times seemed to grow longer, with increasingly unexpected delays. On one infamous ride, when my coworker and I departed our office at the same time, she managed to land in Reykjavik before I reached the nation’s capital. It was around this time that I gave up on riding the rails out of the city altogether.
Whether it’s regional trains from the city to New Jersey on New Jersey Transit, or long-haul rides southward to Northeast Corridor destinations like Philadelphia, Baltimore, or D.C. on Amtrak, delays in and out of NYC have become the norm. The culprit? Every single train car needs to pass through a single, 113-year-old tunnel under the Hudson River, creating the ultimate bottleneck.
“For 30 years, people have known this one-track-in, one-track-out tunnel that connects New York and New Jersey to one another, and also to the rest of the Northeast Corridor, was outdated, aging, delay-prone, and needed to be modernized,” said Stephen Sigmund of the Gateway Program, which is spearheading the Northeast Corridor’s rail infrastructure upgrade. He tells Condé Nast Traveler “there are too many delays that tie up the entire Northeast Corridor for hundreds of thousands of people every day.”
The problem was further exacerbated in 2012 when Superstorm Sandy inundated the tunnel with “billions of gallons of saltwater,” cracking the concrete and damaging the electrical system, Sigmund says, which has resulted in it often sending false signals.
But now, there is finally some relief in the distance. Construction has officially started on both sides of the river for the 4.5-mile Hudson Tunnel Project. The new tunnel, scheduled to open in 2035, will add another inbound and outbound track, doubling train capacity. That means customers will experience fewer delays, and eventually see more service options—including on Amtrak’s new high-speed Acela fleet.
How one bottleneck affects 800,000 passengers
In the Northeast, there are mostly four to six tracks throughout the rail system—except on this one section under the Hudson River. “The irony here is that the busiest section necks down to one track in and one track out—and becomes a choke point for the rest of the corridor,” Sigmund says.
