New York’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority, the architect of some of the most expensive transit projects in the world, has not been typically known for its frugality or punctuality.
Which is why it seemed appropriate on Monday for Gov. Kathy Hochul to celebrate a rare feat for the agency: the completion of a nearly billion-dollar Metro-North Rail Road project that came in well under budget and five years ahead of schedule.
For an agency panned for building the most expensive mile of train track on the planet, a question comes to mind: Really?
“I asked the same question, and the answer is yes,” Ms. Hochul said, standing on the 125th Street platform in East Harlem, overlooking the new work.
The project, which involved replacing badly weathered sections of a 1.8-mile viaduct between East 110th Street and the Harlem River Lift Bridge, was originally expected to take about nine years and cost $960 million. Construction began in October 2023.
The project, a major rehabilitation of the Park Avenue Viaduct, replaced over 12,600 feet of elevated railroad track and infrastructure that was built more than a century ago. The four-track bridge carries all Metro-North train traffic into and out of Grand Central Terminal in Midtown Manhattan. About 750 trains and 260,000 passengers a day rely on the corridor.
Janno Lieber, the authority’s chief executive, said the timeline was cut drastically because of a novel construction method that allowed crews to build much of the replacement structure off site, then transport and lower the concrete segments onto the viaduct with the use of custom-made cranes called gantry systems. The time savings also helped the agency finish the project for nearly $200 million less than anticipated, he said.
“This is new technology that’s never been used in New York at this scale before,” he said, crediting Halmar, the contractor who won the bidding process to lead the work. (Halmar is also part of the joint venture leading construction of the next phase of the Second Avenue subway expansion.)
The M.T.A. said it conducted the repairs over 28 weekends by removing two of four tracks from service to haul the 190,000-pound slabs into place.
The announcement was the state agency’s latest attempt to distance itself from a long history of missed deadlines and inflated budgets, as it moves forward with a record $68 billion capital plan designed to shore up the region’s aging subway, bus and commuter rail road network.
It also comes at a critical time for the authority, which is determined to prove that it can efficiently build major projects, including a $7 billion extension of the Second Avenue Subway line in Manhattan and a $5.5 billion train connecting Brooklyn and Queens.
The viaduct repair work is part of a larger effort to rebuild the so-called Grand Central Artery, the four-mile stretch between Grand Central Terminal in Manhattan and the century-old infrastructure north of the transit hub. Metro-North is the second busiest commuter rail road in the country.
What the success of the viaduct repair suggests for future projects is less clear, said Tom Wright, the president of the Regional Plan Association, an influential urban planning group.
Under past leadership at the M.T.A., it was common for the agency to underestimate construction costs and timelines because it was politically expedient.
“Everybody knew things would never get done in that time frame or that price,” Mr. Wright said of past projects, such as the Long Island Rail Road extension known as East Side Access, which was completed in 2023, after years of delays and ballooning costs. Mr. Lieber, who officially became head of the agency a year earlier, finished the project.
“The M.T.A. is getting much better at doing these,” Mr. Wright said. But he questioned whether its expedited timeline for the viaduct project suggests they may be “overcompensating in the other direction now.”
The authority has had scheduling challenges at other ongoing projects.
The agency said in October that an expansion of Metro-North rail service to four new stations in the Bronx could be delayed by three years, because of construction delays that it blamed on Amtrak, the national rail service that owns the tracks. The new stations — at Hunts Point, Parkchester, Morris Park and Co-op City — would represent Metro-North’s biggest expansion since the 1980s.
“It’s not a secret that we’ve had difficulty on other projects where there were other railroads,” Mr. Lieber said.
Amtrak did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
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