The Hudson Tunnel Project Survived a Funding Freeze. Now It's Racing the Riverbed.
A $16 billion rail tunnel under the Hudson River is finally close to boring — but only after a federal funding pause halted construction earlier this year, and only once 500 buried piles from a 19th-century pier are cleared out of the way.
Every weekday, roughly 200,000 rail commuters pass through century-old tubes under the Hudson River that were never meant to last this long. The Hudson Tunnel Project — a new two-tube crossing that would finally let those originals go offline for the rehabilitation they’ve needed for years — is the answer, and 2026 has been the year it stopped being mostly paperwork.
In April, the Gateway Development Commission awarded the contract for Package 1C, the Hudson River Tunnel Section, which will use two mixed-use tunnel boring machines to cut through a genuinely awkward mix of bedrock, soft soil, and fill dumped into the river to expand the Manhattan shoreline over the last two centuries. But before either machine can start cutting, the riverbed itself has to be made safe to cut through — which is why the GDC board just approved an $88 million change order to remove roughly 500 submerged wooden piles left over from Pier 68, a 19th-century freight pier that burned down in 1964 and was demolished without anyone pulling out what was holding it up. Left in place, those piles are exactly the kind of obstruction that can wreck a tunnel boring machine’s cutting head.
That change order is a small, unglamorous line item, but it’s a useful reminder of how a megaproject like this actually loses time: not to some dramatic engineering failure, but to a 60-year-old pier nobody thought about until a boring machine’s route ran straight through its foundations. Weeks Marine, the marine contractor already mobilized in the river, tested the removal approach on a handful of piles back in 2025 before the full scope was approved — a fairly ordinary story of a project quietly de-risking itself, one obstruction at a time.
It’s also a project that has already stopped once this year for a much less ordinary reason. In early February, a freeze on roughly $15 billion in federal grants and loans — money the GDC had fully executed agreements for — forced an actual construction pause that idled nearly 1,000 jobs across the New York and New Jersey work sites. Work resumed later that month once the Commission received about $235 million released from that same federal funding, but as of the GDC’s own board meeting in July, some of the project’s largest remaining procurements were still on hold pending full restoration of the paused funds. Two years to the day after signing the deal that was supposed to lock in the entire $16 billion the project needs, the commissioners were marking the anniversary by talking about the fight to keep that money flowing, not just the tunneling ahead of them.
That’s the real shape of the story this year: cranes and cofferdams genuinely moving in the Hudson River, a construction package awarded, a pile-removal contract signed — and, sitting underneath all of it, a federal funding relationship that has already proven it can simply stop without warning. The tunnel boring machines will get their turn once the riverbed is clear. Whether the money keeps showing up on schedule between now and then is a separate question, and on this project’s track record so far this year, not a guaranteed one.