Courtesy of the excellent Second Avenue Sagas blog, here’s a fascinating video on the construction of the East River Tunnel (the 63rd Street one) in New York City during the 1970s.
There are two interesting aspects to this tunnel. The first is its construction method – via an immersed tube rather than via the typical method of a bored tunnel. One wonders whether a similar type of tunnel could be considered for a future crossing of the Waitemata Harbour. The second interesting thing about the tunnel is the long and convoluted story about its history:
Construction of the 63rd Street Tunnel began on November 24, 1969 and the tunnel was holed through beneath Roosevelt Island on October 10, 1972. However, completion of the tunnel was delayed by New York City’s fiscal crisis of the 1970s. The tunnel was placed into partial service in 1989.
The final section of the 63rd Street Tunnel, which cost $645 million to complete and connected what had been a service dead-ending at the 21st Street Station in Queensbridge to the IND Queens Boulevard Line, was finished in 2000 and first used by trains during the off-peak hours while signal work was performed in the 53rd Street Tunnel. The tunnel connection was placed into permanent service with the start of V train and the shifting of the route of the F train on December 17, 2001.
Yikes, so it took 20 years for the tunnel to be completed and put in any sort of service, and then another 12 years before the project was properly completed. But even then, currently only one level of the tunnel is in use – the bottom level was constructed to allow Long Island Railroad trains access to Grand Central Station, a project that is only being completed now.
Let’s hope that Auckland’s CBD Rail Tunnel doesn’t take quite as long to complete.
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They did investigate a submerged tunnel for the AWHC but they decided it would be to hard to get consent for it as digging the trench could do a lot of damage to harbour
I’m not sure that we want the sort of timeline on any harbour project that occurred here…. love that 70s footage though….
The Sydney Harbour Tunnel is an immersed tube. The trench in which it was placed and then covered was dredged into the harbour floor. The dredged material was transferred directly to barges and dumped at sea to minimise the environmental impact to the harbour. The harbour traffic is not disturbed because both the dredging and the positioning of the immersed tubes is done one section at a time.