Is Amtrak Up to Crossing the Hudson?

As billions flow to the Gateway Program’s Hudson River megaproject for new bridges and tunnels, an audit finds that Amtrak has serious work to do—in-house.

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Earlier this month, the Office of the Amtrak Inspector General released the results of an audit requested by Amtrak’s board of directors on the rail company’s readiness to manage its Gateway Program commitments. Some of the smaller projects connected to this $30 billion megaproject are already under way. One of the bigger undertakings scheduled to begin in the coming weeks is the replacement of the ancient North Portal Bridge rail crossing for Amtrak and New Jersey Transit. The main event, construction on the tunnels, begins in 2023.

The rail company has spent nearly a billion dollars since 2012 on elements of the project and has ramped up hiring, but it has not created a formal “program management framework” of discrete timelines, protocols, and other procedures. Amtrak is not the lead partner on either project (the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey is lead partner on the Hudson Tunnel connecting Manhattan to New Jersey, as is New Jersey Transit on the Portal Bridge). Amtrak’s role as a primary project lead comes at much later stages of the Gateway. The audit, however, indicated that as the rail company embarks on one of the most consequential projects in its history, it has to get with the program and ramp up its in-house project management oversight, communications, and assessments of the risks posed to the Gateway behemoth.

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Over the past decade, the must-get-done Gateway Program has survived some of the nastiest political headbanging over funding that the Northeast Corridor has ever seen, from Chris Christie’s axing of the Gateway’s predecessor project to Washington melodramas starring Chuck Schumer, Andrew Cuomo, and Donald Trump. Now, President Biden’s newly enacted bipartisan Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act is poised to fund a healthy portion of the project, which will be overseen by the Gateway Development Commission in partnership with Amtrak, the Port Authority, NJ Transit, and, at the federal level, the Department of Transportation, the Federal Railroad Administration (FRA), and Federal Transit Administration (FTA). New York and New Jersey have agreed to put up 50 percent of the funding. The project has gotten green lights on a host of prerequisites: federal environmental impact assessments, Army Corps of Engineers permissions, Manhattan land acquisitions, and a higher FTA rating that opens up its eligibility for federal capital investment grants and the remainder of the funds.

Amtrak contends that it is adding to its role as railroad passenger operator that of megaproject manager. But Gateway isn’t Amtrak’s first project management rodeo, and its record on devising these kinds of frameworks is pockmarked. “Our assessments of prior complex construction and acquisition programs found that when the company did not put this framework in place early enough, it experienced cost increases, schedule delays, and stress on its partner relationships,” the auditors found.

Over the past decade, the must-get-done Gateway Program has survived some of the nastiest political headbanging over funding that the Northeast Corridor has ever seen.

A case in point: the Moynihan Train Hall project, which in 2020 moved New York’s Amtrak and Long Island Railroad services from the bowels of Madison Square Garden to the Farley Post Office building across the street. The project suffered from cost overruns of nearly 70 percent (due to failures to budget for basics like IT, for example), weak executive management, and a staff outmatched by the project demands. The audit also cited management problems in the upgrades to Washington’s Union Station and the Acela 21 program.

Amtrak failed to explain how it plans to forecast, track, update, and control Gateway Program costs in the management documents it provided to the auditors. Instead, Amtrak merely inserted a description of its finance department. Staffing practices were also judged to be abysmal. When a lead engineer left the program, not one but five engineers replaced that person and were responsible not only for Gateway work but for their pre-existing Amtrak projects as well. A part-time scheduler told the auditors that once work on the project started in earnest, Amtrak would need an entire dedicated team of schedulers.

The current tight labor market presents Amtrak with a challenge. A December 2021 review of the railroad’s human resources department discovered that it does not have the staff to handle bringing on the 2,500 to 3,500 more people that Amtrak needs to hire in fiscal 2022. Nearly half of its 64 hiring positions are vacant. In other words, Amtrak doesn’t have the people it needs to hire the people it needs to handle Gateway projects, along with returning to pre-pandemic passenger levels (Amtrak is at 70 percent of pre-COVID passenger levels), or the staff required to handle the state-of-good-repair program envisioned in the president’s infrastructure program.

Amtrak’s most consequential weakness, however, may be an inability to keep up with risks and future threats to the Gateway. Those could include not only new supply chain disruptions that may delay steel or concrete procurements, but also, and worse, political tremors in Trenton, Albany, and Washington. It doesn’t take much for a capricious politico like Christie (“The only prudent move is to end this project,” he said in 2010); Cuomo (“It’s not my tunnel,” 2015), or Trump (“We have the money set aside but we haven’t decided to use it yet,” 2019) to hijack and delay progress. To be sure, all three are gone, but the current project-friendly triumvirate of Biden, New York Gov. Kathy Hochul, and New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy won’t be there forever. Besides, there are the other projects on Amtrak’s plate—the replacement of Maryland’s 149-year-old Baltimore and Potomac Tunnel and New York’s East River tunnels among them—that will compete for finite streams of money.

“The timeline that we are looking towards now is to get all the funding finalized, done, and in place by the end of the calendar year,” says Stephen Sigmund, the Gateway Development Commission’s chief of public outreach. “If the politics changes over time, and the funding is already in place, you just keep going forward with what you have available to you at the time, which is exactly what we did during the Trump administration. Remember, we did not let this project die.”

Amtrak has pledged to devise comprehensive road maps, protocols, and assessments of its internal processes by early summer.

This article is part of our ongoing series on sustainable mobility, transportation, and climate.

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