• Central Artery Question.

  • Discussion relating to commuter rail, light rail, and subway operations of the MBTA.
Discussion relating to commuter rail, light rail, and subway operations of the MBTA.

Moderators: sery2831, CRail

  by braves
 
I heard that a portion of a tunnel or wall was built near South Station for a future North Station/South Station Rail Link.

If this is true, where is the tunnel or wall built & if anyone has pictures of this, please post them up.

  by CJ
 
Yes, I beleive it was someone here that said that.

To my knowledge, they are only slurry walls, not complete tunnels at all (However hopefully im wrong, and theres a tunnel :P)

  by F-line to Dudley via Park
 
Some of the slurry walls that were poured to supported the weight of the old elevated Artery during construction go deep enough to be recycled as tunnel walls on sections of the proposed N-S link ROW. The rail link was part of the original design decades ago, but in order to secure federal funding for the rest of the project they had to sacrifice building that part until afterward. Therefore, they put in the provision for the tunnel to be added later by pouring the slurry walls and relocating utilities out of the way. There's no tunnel shell or anything yet. The whole ROW would still need to be completely excavated (I think it's deep enough for construction not to require much surface disruption). It's just that when they eventually do that one of the tunnel walls will already be in place on parts of the route, and all of the pipes and cables will have already been moved out of the way.