By Elise Young, Bloomberg; January 28, 2019
Along Amtrak’s Northeast Corridor, roughly $3.4 billion in improvements are underway to bring faster, more reliable service to the busiest rail route in the U.S. Yet the region’s biggest and most important infrastructure project remains unfunded, a failure that threatens service to 820,000 regional and commuter passengers each workday.
Station renovations, high-speed track, power lines and signals — all decades-deferred work that has begun — will be for naught if century-old infrastructure under the Hudson River crumbles. In all, Amtrak needs at least $37 billion for improvements from New York to Washington, D.C., with the bulk of it — $30 billion — for Gateway, which would include replacing a rickety bridge, building a second tunnel linking New Jersey to Manhattan and overhauling an existing one whose days are numbered.