By TED MANN
Ramsay de Give for The Wall Street Journal
A view of the cavernous area that has been opened many stories below Grand Central Terminal as part of the East Side Access project.
On a recent Saturday, after weeks of planning, works crews were set to converge on a Queens train yard to continue their painstaking progress on the largest, most expensive mass-transit project in the U.S.
But hours before work was to begin, an email landed in the inboxes of three-dozen project managers and engineers. Its message: Most of the work would have to be canceled. Amtrak, which controls access to the tracks, was diverting its workers to a different job: a celebration of National Train Day.
Such abrupt shifts are only one source of the snags that have bedeviled the $8.1 billion East Side Access project as it has fallen years behind its original completion estimate of 2013.
On Monday, Metropolitan Transportation Authority officials are expected to again announce a new target date for completion of the project. MTA Chairman Joseph Lhota said recently he thought it would be finished no sooner than 2019. The estimated cost is likely to grow along with the timeline.
Meanwhile, the inspector general of the federal Department of Transportation, which has committed nearly $2.7 billion in funding, announced last week that it would audit the project starting late this month. In the announcement, the DOT cited cost overruns and delays.
The project is one of the most technically daunting the MTA has ever attempted: tunneling and blasting in two boroughs to bring Long Island Rail Road trains to a new station buried roughly 15 stories beneath Grand Central Terminal. In Queens, workers have dug through loose soil and under active rail tracks. They are gingerly carving a tunnel out from beneath a subway line, the footing of an elevated train and heavily trafficked Northern Boulevard.
The biggest challenge, however, hasn’t been engineering.
Instead, it is a clash of competing agendas that arise from the project’s unique plight: rebuilding the nation’s busiest passenger rail-crossing even as trains from three separate lines keep rumbling through.
Unlike other megaprojects, East Side Access is upgrading century-old infrastructure during stolen moments—at night and over weekends.
It is, said Michael Horodniceanu, president of the MTA’s construction division, “like riding a bicycle while trying to change the tire.”
The situation has lead to inevitable conflict—some even within the MTA itself—between those like Mr. Horodniceanu, who are responsible for building vast new infrastructure, and railroad officials, whose primary concern is keeping the trains running on time.
“It’s a very difficult thing, and they all report to different masters,” said Robert Yaro, president of the Regional Plan Association. “It’s not because anybody’s being nasty or petty, [but] they probably need to do better. The delays we’re seeing are costing tons of time and money.”
Much of the work is centered in the no man’s land between Long Island City and Sunnyside, Queens, where LIRR, NJ Transit and Amtrak share a rail yard and an adjacent, mile-long section of tracks and switches called the Harold Interlocking.
Mark Abramson for The Wall Street Journal
Michael Horodniceanu, president of the MTA’s construction division, explains the East Side Access project recently.
Amtrak sends 48 trains through the Harold Interlocking on an average weekday, while Long Island Rail Road sends roughly 600. Meanwhile, in the adjoining Sunnyside Yard, NJ Transit stores about 40 trains per weekday, to help handle the westbound afternoon rush from Penn Station into New Jersey.
With so many players vying for the same turf, the sources of delays are endless. In no particular order, MTA, Amtrak and LIRR officials checked off the culprits that could delay work: foul weather, national holidays, sporting events, emergency breakdowns elsewhere along the rails and union work rules.
Some are anticipated: Crews had been ready to work on a recent Sunday, one East Side Access official noted, but LIRR had been loath to cancel trains on Mother’s Day.
Others aren’t. One MTA official described the reaction to Amtrak’s last-minute missive about the Train Day event as “disbelief,” closely followed by “words you would not be able to print in the newspaper.”
Mr. Lhota, by contrast, said in an interview that such complaints amounted to “whining,” and that the MTA was “honored” to have hosted Amtrak’s annual rail-appreciation festival at Grand Central on May 12.
Al Fazio, a deputy chief engineer for Amtrak, was apologetic.
“That’s an undesirable situation,” he said, adding that the railroads tried to avoid 11th-hour changes. “No job is perfect.”
Another constant headache for MTA officials: abiding by the work rules of Amtrak’s unionized workers. Safety regulations require experienced power crews to disable electricity on the tracks before contractors can enter them to perform the foundation-digging and rail-laying work under way at the Harold Interlocking.
Under Amtrak’s agreement with the Brotherhood of Maintenance of Way Employees, workers meet each Thursday at “the pick,” where they can select overtime assignments for the coming weekend. But if Amtrak can’t assemble a full crew, because workers choose to work elsewhere or don’t choose to work at all, the MTA is often unable to do all the work it planned.
“To say it’s frustrating would be an understatement,” the MTA official said. “When you go through and have all this stuff planned out and worked through, and you’ve lined up equipment a week in advance, and then have it changed for whatever reason…it’s a constant fire drill.”
The blame doesn’t lie with the union, said Jed Dodd, the longtime general chairman of the Pennsylvania Federation of the BMWE, which represents many of Amtrak’s workers on the Queens site.
Amtrak officials could restructure the workweek to make either Saturday or Sunday a regular workday to address the unavailability of workers, Mr. Dodd said. Or, he added, it could hire more workers.
“The seniority system isn’t the problem of getting people on the job sites,” he said.
Inconvenience also isn’t a one-way street. On a recent Monday, crews were at work near the eastbound tracks in the Harold Interlocking repairing a power cable that had been damaged by East Side Access work crews, and which Amtrak and LIRR trains depended on for train operations.
Long Island trains will already be cut back this July to accommodate construction, said LIRR President Helena Williams—the railroad will temporarily lose a switch when a boring machine carves the last of four new tunnels directly beneath it.
East Side Access officials have been getting along better in recent months with Amtrak and Long Island Rail Road, all sides said.
With tensions over conflicting missions at a high point late last year, railroad officials began convening weekly planning meetings to help reconcile goals and improve the pace of construction. Ms. Williams elevated a key deputy to oversee the project and spur communication. Mr. Lhota and his Amtrak counterpart, Joseph Boardman, speak regularly.
The discussions also have included NJ Transit, which uses the Sunnyside Yard to store trains during the day until the afternoon rush.
Although officials are keenly aware of the political and popular blowback from train disruptions, more schedule changes are likely to come in the ensuing years, Ms. Williams and Mr. Lhota said.
“We’re not talking about shutdown: I don’t think that’s possible,” Mr. Lhota said, referring to the possibility of halting rail traffic at Harold altogether.
But Amtrak is already planning service disruptions to make way for the first phase of its own high-profile project, the construction of Moynihan Station. Such temporary interruptions should be seen as “investment” in an improved transit system, he said, adding, “That’s a good indication of what needs to happen.”
A version of this article appeared May 21, 2012, on page A17 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: Clashing Underground.
