Every tunnel-boring contract on the Hudson Tunnel Project has now been awarded. That is the milestone worth marking in August 2026, and it means the $16 billion program has crossed from procurement into execution on its hardest scope. Seven of ten construction packages are in progress or complete, two Herrenknecht machines are being assembled inside a 600-foot launch box in North Bergen, and the Gateway Development Commission spent the summer buying down risk on a riverbed that has been holding 19th-century timber since before the Delaware, Lackawanna and Western Railroad burned down its own freight pier.
What Is Actually Being Built
The Hudson Tunnel Project is two jobs sold as one. The first is roughly nine miles of new passenger rail track between North Bergen and Manhattan, including a new two-tube tunnel under the Hudson River — nearly five miles of bore when you count both tubes. The second is a full rehabilitation of the North River Tunnel, in service since 1910 and badly degraded by Superstorm Sandy saltwater intrusion. The sequencing matters: the new tunnel has to carry traffic before the old one can be taken out of service tube by tube. That dependency is why revenue service in the new tunnel is targeted for 2035 and North River rehabilitation does not finish until 2038.
Cost splits roughly $14 billion for the new tunnel and $2 billion for the North River work. The Gateway Development Commission is the owner, with Amtrak, NJ Transit, the Federal Railroad Administration and the Federal Transit Administration as partners.
The ten construction packages include the Tonnelle Avenue Bridge and utility relocation, Hudson Yards Concrete Casing Section 3, Hudson River Ground Stabilization, the Palisades Tunnel, the Manhattan Tunnel, the Hudson River Tunnel Section, New Jersey Surface Alignment, and a noise abatement program. Tonnelle Avenue and the utility relocations are done. The Hudson County Access Shaft slurry wall in Weehawken is complete.
The Palisades Drive: Hard Rock at 35,000 PSI
The New Jersey side is a hard-rock problem, and it is a severe one.
The Palisades Tunnel runs roughly a mile — about 5,100 feet of twin tunnel — from a portal at Tonnelle Avenue in North Bergen to the Hudson County Access Shaft in Weehawken. The alignment starts about 80 feet below grade and climbs to roughly 280 feet of overburden under the Palisades ridge. The rock is diabase averaging 35,000 psi unconfined compressive strength. For scale, a structural concrete mix on a commercial job is 4,000 to 6,000 psi. Diabase at 35,000 psi sits near the practical ceiling of what a hard-rock TBM can cut economically, and it is abrasive enough that crews expect cutterhead maintenance every two days rather than the weekly interval typical of softer rock.
Two Herrenknecht machines handle the drive. Each weighs about 1,680 tons, runs roughly 500 feet with trailing gantries, and carries more than 1,000 sensors monitoring position, component wear and air quality. The Gateway Development Commission's published figures put the cutterhead at 28 feet 8 inches with a finished inside diameter of 25 feet 2 inches after the precast segmental liner is erected; trade reporting from the site has described the excavated bore as 29 feet with a 25-foot-4-inch finished diameter. The difference is inches, but it is worth naming rather than papering over. The two tubes run about 50 feet apart, with six cross passages planned and refuge chambers stocked with oxygen, food and communications.
Expected advance is 25 to 30 feet per day with roughly 40 crew per machine. The machines probe-drill about 150 feet ahead of the face on a continuous cycle, looking for water-bearing fault zones. When a probe finds one, crews stop and grout ahead of the face before advancing. That pre-excavation grouting is not a contingency — in fractured diabase with a known fault zone on the alignment, it is a planned production activity, and estimators pricing similar work should treat probe-and-grout cycles as recurring cost, not as a change-order event.
Getting the machines here took 18 months of manufacturing and factory acceptance testing in Germany, with components arriving through the ports of Baltimore and Newark. The launch box itself is a piece of work most coverage skips: 600 feet long, about 80 feet deep, supported with soldier piles and lagging stabilized with shotcrete, with a 300-ton crane sitting on dedicated concrete pads to lower and assemble TBM sections. If you want to sanity-check the earthwork quantity on a cut that size, the excavation calculator gets you into the right order of magnitude quickly.
The Palisades package went to a Schiavone / Dragados / Lane joint venture at $465.6 million.
Under the River, the Geology Inverts
Package 1C is the opposite problem in every respect.
The Gateway Development Commission awarded the Hudson River Tunnel Section on April 27, 2026 to a Traylor Bros. / Walsh Construction / Skanska joint venture for $1.29 billion — the largest and final tunnel-boring contract on the project, delivered design-bid-build. Skanska has reported its own share at about $363 million. The scope is two parallel single-track tubes of roughly 7,250 feet each, running from the Hudson County Access Shaft in Weehawken to the 12th Avenue Access Shaft on Manhattan's West Side.
The quantities give a useful picture of the liner package alone: about 14,500 precast segments forming more than 2,400 rings, plus tunnel liner and floor installation and nine cross passages between the tubes. The contract also carries ground stabilization near the Hudson-Bergen Light Rail and permanent underpinning of the Willow Avenue Bridge — mining beneath a live transit right-of-way with settlement tolerances measured in millimeters.
Under the river, the ground stops being rock and becomes saturated silt. That flips the machine problem entirely. Hard-rock TBMs cut and muck; soft-ground machines under a river have to hold the face pressure balanced against hydrostatic head at all times, because a lost face in that material does not squeeze — it runs. Two radically different tunneling methods on one alignment is unusual, even in a market currently running 14 tunnel boring machines under eight US cities, and it is the reason the contract stack is split the way it is rather than handed to a single prime.
What the $88 Million Change Order Really Signals
On July 8, 2026, the Gateway board approved an $88 million change order with Weeks Marine, already the contractor on the Hudson River Ground Stabilization work.
The scope: remove or stabilize roughly 500 wooden piles buried in the riverbed, left behind when Pier 68 was demolished. The pier dated to the late 1800s, when it served as a freight terminal for the Delaware, Lackawanna and Western Railroad. It burned and was demolished in the 1960s. The piles stayed. After the piles are cleared, crews will mix lightweight concrete into the surrounding soil to create more consistent ground for the machines to cut. Work is expected to begin in late 2026, well ahead of the 2028 start of Hudson River boring.
Read that as a risk-transfer decision, not a surprise. A slurry or variable-density machine that hits a 30-foot timber pile at the face does not stop cleanly — it wraps the pile, damages cutting tools, and can force a hyperbaric intervention 100-plus feet below a working harbor. The cost of that intervention, plus the schedule impact on a critical-path drive, dwarfs $88 million. Buying certainty on the ground before the machine arrives is the cheapest money on the job. Owners running deep tunnel programs should note the pattern: pre-treat the ground on the owner's dime and schedule, or pay for it later at the contractor's rate under differing-site-conditions.
Where the Remaining Money Is
With every boring contract awarded, the primary contracting opportunity shifts down a tier. What is still going to market is the supply and subcontract package behind the machines: precast segment production and delivery, grout supply and injection, ventilation, muck conveyance, survey and instrumentation, settlement monitoring arrays, electrical and mechanical fit-out, and the marine work supporting the river drive.
Precast segment demand alone is substantial — more than 2,400 rings on Package 1C plus the Palisades rings — and that is a cement, aggregate and reinforcing bar story as much as a tunneling one. Contractors bidding that scope should be watching concrete input pricing closely, since segment plants price on long-term supply agreements that have to survive a multi-year drive.
For firms trying to get in front of the remaining packages, the federal bid board is the practical starting point — the tunneling primes are set, but their procurement is just beginning.
What Happens Next
The near-term watch items are concrete and datable. The Palisades TBMs launch from Tonnelle Avenue during 2026, with the second machine following the first. Weeks Marine begins pile removal and riverbed treatment in late 2026. Hudson River boring starts in 2028. Revenue service in the new tunnel is 2035, and the North River Tunnel rehabilitation runs to 2038.
The thing to watch on the Palisades drive is not the ribbon-cutting — it is the advance rate once the machines are in full-face diabase. At 25 to 30 feet per day, a mile of twin tunnel is roughly a year of production per machine if nothing goes wrong. Probe drilling will find the fault zone. What the grouting program does to that daily average is the number that tells you whether 2035 holds.
For more coverage of federally funded heavy civil work, see Buildermuse's infrastructure section.