The MTA’s plan to bring the Long Island Rail Road into Grand Central is now nearly $1 billion dollars over budget, officials revealed yesterday.
The stunning increase comes after a host of engineering and construction problems sparked major delays in the project, which has also seen its completion date moved back several times over the years.
It is now expected to be finished in August 2019 — four years after the initial estimate of 2015 — at a cost of $8.24 billion.
The agency’s last price estimate — projected in 2009 — was for $7.32 billion.
The MTA will pay for $200 million of the cost overrun by finding savings elsewhere. The rest will be addressed in the agency’s capital budget for 2015 to 2019.
Officials blamed the $920 million jump on grossly optimistic earlier projections.
“The era of underestimating public work projects is over,” MTA CEO Joseph Lhota said in announcing the higher price tag.
Dubbed East Side Access, it’s the largest and most expensive transit project in the country.
One of the most daunting tasks has been tunnelling in Queens, where softer-than-expected soil has delayed completion.
The work also had to be done around the busy Harold Interlocking system, which provides signals for LIRR, Amtrak and New Jersey Transit trains.
“It’s the most complicated interlocking anywhere in the United States,” explained Lhota.
“It is what I call the ‘miracle of Penn Station.’ It happens every day.”
Eight hundred trains a day use Harold, which has made it difficult for the MTA to find enough time to work on East Side Access.
To try to speed up construction, the MTA is rearranging its LIRR schedule in July, cancelling three yet-to-be chosen morning trains into Manhattan and changing the schedule of another six.
In addition to the thorny engineering issues, the project has also been hit with several strokes of bad luck.
Most notably, Amtrak finally announced in the fall it would repair the aging East River tunnels, which the MTA had been clamoring about for years. Unfortunately, those repairs have at times made working on East Side Access — which will also use those tunnels — more difficult.
Still, Lhota promised LIRR riders that the project — partially funded by the federal government — was in no way in jeopardy.
“The investment in East Side Access is going to be extraordinary both for New York and Long Island,” he said.