After Trump loss in Hudson River tunnel funding battle, work on high-tech boring machines advancing

Evan Simko-Bednarski, New York Daily News on Apr 13, 2026

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NEW YORK — A little more than a month after construction of the Hudson River Tunnel resumed, crews are working assembling the specialized machines necessary to dig the first stage of a pair of rail tunnels through the tough rock of the New Jersey Palisades.

The project’s two massive tunnel-boring machines — manufactured in Germany and shipped to the Garden State as 96 separate pieces each — were still sitting in crates waiting to be assembled when work on the project halted earlier this year amid funding interference from the feds. The Trump administration was eventually forced to resume funding the project.

Monday, at the work site in North Bergen, N.J., along the eastern edge of the Meadowlands, dozens of workers were preparing the machines for the year-long project of digging towards Manhattan.

Brendan Corzo, a 28-year-old operating engineer, was among those working on assembling a pair of massive 165-ton cutting heads — arrays of blades and abrasive wheels shipped to the site in five parts.

Corzo was attaching heating pads to two adjacent sections in order to prepare the metal for welding. “This whole joint will be pre-heated to 250 degrees,” Corzo told the Daily News, “so we don’t have deformities when we go to weld.”

Meanwhile colleagues of his carefully adjusted a series of jigs to make sure the pieces of the massive metal maul were properly aligned.

After assembly, the cutting heads will get attached to the “main drive,” an array of eleven hydraulic motors sitting outside under a blue tarp — what chief engineer Hamed Nejad called “the heart of the machine.”

More parts — like conveyor belts, cranes, metal shielding and controls will be added thereafter. Officials wouldn’t commit to a launch-date for the diggers, but said they should be ready to go in a few months.

The machines were part of a $465 million contract to dig this section of tunnel awarded in August 2024 to Schiavone Dragados Lane Joint Venture.

The tunnel boring machines are a far cry from the methods used to construct the current rail tunnels that connect the Meadowlands to Penn Station — the 1910 North River Tunnel, which relied on drills and explosives to get through New Jersey’s tough and abrasive basalt bedrock.

By contrast, the boring machines — custom built specifically for this job — will grind away at the igneous rock, remove it via conveyor belts, and leave a path of concrete linings in its wake, digging and building the tunnel all at once at a rate of some 30 feet per day.

At that rate, the tunnel will extend under the Palisades and reach the Hudson River in about a year, said James Sterace, chief of program delivery for the Gateway Development Commission, the bi-state body responsible for the tunnel.

Once there, the million-dollar machines will have served their purpose. They will be extracted via a shaft cut down into Weehawken, N.J.

Another pair of machines, more suited for digging through the loose sand beneath the Hudson River, will pick up where these left off, and continue on toward Manhattan.