The First Tunnel Boring Machine Is Finally Digging Under the Hudson
On October 7, the Hudson Tunnel Project's first tunnel boring machine began mining in New Jersey, the first new rail tunnel under the Hudson River in more than 100 years.
On October 7, a 1,680-ton tunnel boring machine began cutting the first new rail tunnel under the Hudson River in more than 100 years. The first new tunnel underneath the Hudson River in more than 100 years is no longer a plan or a procurement line — as of early October, there is a machine grinding through rock on the New Jersey side of the Hudson Tunnel Project, and a second one getting ready to follow it.
The Gateway Development Commission announced that the first machine began mining on schedule on October 7, 2026, a phrase that deserves a moment of appreciation on a megaproject with this one’s history: on schedule. The two machines are single-shield tunnel borings built specifically for hard, dry rock, each weighing more than 1,680 tons, with cutterheads measuring 28 feet, 8 inches in diameter. That is a lot of steel to be eating through bedrock on a precise line under one of the densest rail corridors in the country.
This first machine has 5,100 feet of tunnel tube to excavate, running from North Bergen to the Hudson County Access Shaft. A second machine is expected to launch in the coming weeks, at which point two cutterheads will be advancing in parallel — the first time that has happened under this river since the existing tubes were driven through it a century ago.
The point of the exercise is not just the new tunnel but the old ones. The existing North River Tunnels, which carry every Amtrak and New Jersey Transit train between New Jersey and Penn Station, were severely damaged when Hurricane Sandy flooded them in 2012, and they have been operating on borrowed time ever since. The new crossing is the piece that finally makes a full rehabilitation possible: once the new tubes are carrying trains, the century-old originals can go offline for the repairs they have needed for over a decade. That has been the logic of the broader Gateway Program from the start — build the redundancy first, then fix what the redundancy protects.
When the new tunnel opens in 2035, it is expected to serve more than 200,000 daily riders between New York and New Jersey. That figure is worth sitting with, because it is the same number of people who currently pass through tunnels that have been one service-disrupting failure away from paralyzing the region’s entire rail commute since 2012. Every foot this machine cuts is footage of that risk shrinking.
There is something fitting about how the milestone arrived, too. After years in which the project’s biggest obstacles were funding fights, contract awards, and riverbed hazards rather than anything resembling tunneling, the actual mining has started quietly, on the date it was supposed to. The dramatic part of a tunnel boring machine’s work is that it is not dramatic at all — a cutterhead turning through rock, day after day, for years, until there is a tube where there was none. As of October 7, that unglamorous, unstoppable process is underway under the Hudson.