By Philip Newman
It took $645 million and more than six years to complete the 1,500-foot tunnel addition between the 21st Street-Queensbridge station in Long Island City and the E and F lines at a point west of the Queens Plaza Station.
Planning for the 63rd Street Tunnel dates back to 1963. When it was completed in 1989, the East River tunnel included a station on Roosevelt Island and dead-ended at 21st Street-Queensbridge, thus the “line to nowhere” sobriquet. Critics said it should have linked up with the E and F lines from the start.
Al O'Leary, chief spokesman for the Transit Authority, said the tunnel will make it possible to reroute up to 15 E and F trains an hour between Queens and Manhattan, resulting in less crowding, which is severe at rush-hour periods.
Details of where and how “the reconfiguration,” as O'Leary calls it, will work have yet to be announced. The plan also must go before the Metropolitan Transportation Authority board of directors and public hearings.
The TA plans to run the first E and F trains through the 63rd Street Connector Tunnel in January, but only at non-peak times, and nights and weekends during signal repairs in the 53rd Street tunnel, the regular E and F train route.
O'Leary said subway riders will not see a big difference in service until late next summer, “probably late August but possibly September” when large numbers of trains will use the new tunnel along with the 53rd Street tube.
Finer points of the change yet to be disclosed include whether straphangers will be able to transfer to the Lexington Avenue line and where E and F trains routed through the 63rd Street tunnel will join the regular route in Manhattan.
O'Leary called the fact that the tunnel was built at all “remarkable.”
“This project was built beneath eight lanes of traffic on Northern Boulevard, under buildings without compromising their integrity and under another subway tunnel without interfering with traffic – an extremely complex thing to undertake in the first place. Truly remarkable,” he said.
Gene Russianoff, an attorney for the transit watchdog agency Straphangers Campaign, said “hopefully, this will take some pressure off two of our most brutally crowded subway lines. Congestion on these lines ranks right up close to the Lexington line.”
Together, the E and F lines running through central Queens to Jamaica and Jamaica Center from Manhattan carry an average of 900,000 riders daily out of the 4.7 million in the entire subway system.
