00:00This is the beginning of the tunnel. It'll start here. This is the future portal. This is where the
00:05tunnel boring operation will begin. What you're looking behind us at is rock basalt. So all of
00:12the rock behind us, that's about 75 feet long till we get to the portal, that'll all be excavated
00:19over the next few months. That'll control blasting and chopping and that rock will be taken out
00:26and eventually the tunnel boring machine will come into this pit and be assembled where we're
00:31standing here. So this is the cutter head and this will turn and it'll cut the rock into little pieces.
00:40The cutter heads, they came in five pieces. They're getting welded there. The disc cutters are made of
00:50tungsten carbide, which is actually a material harder than diamond and it cuts the rock. Why?
01:00This rock here is 35,000 PSI and very abrasive. This is the Hudson Tunnel Project. It's one of the
01:09critical projects nationwide. It's important for the Northeast economy. It's important for the United
01:17States. It's the earliest travel routes in the nation and the existing tunnels are old and they
01:23need repair and we looked at various ways of doing that and what we came upon was the need to
01:31build two
01:31new tunnels. These are tunnels that will go from where we are now, which is North Bergen, through the
01:39Palisades Mountain, underneath the Hudson River, into just short of Penn Station, under Hudson Yards.
01:44The Hudson Tunnel Project's target is 2035 and at some point after that would be when this
01:53revenue service would start.
Comments