Long Island Rail Road trains ready for return to rebuilt East River tunnel

The change may be nearly imperceptible to riders looking out their windows in the semidarkness, but beginning this week, some Long Island Rail Road trains will traverse a new East River tunnel whose reconstruction was more than a decade in the making.

The tunnel, known as Line 2, is officially reopening Monday, according to U.S. Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), who helped secure federal funding for reconstructing it and another one, Line 1, both of which were damaged during Superstorm Sandy. They are among four East River tunnel crossings from Penn Station in Manhattan into Queens used by Amtrak, the LIRR and New Jersey Transit, which stores trains at a depot in Queens.

"Long Islanders who commute into the city every day will have a much better, safer, and more on-time ride than they have had," Schumer told Newsday.

Lines 1 and 2 originally opened in 1910, the same year as the original Penn Station. In 2012, Superstorm Sandy inundated both lines with millions of gallons of floodwater, leaving behind salt residue that caused long-term corrosion, contributing to train disruptions. 

Repairs were delayed in part because of conflict over responsibility between Amtrak, which owns the tunnels, and the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, which as LIRR’s parent agency, is their heaviest user.

In May 2025, the East River Tunnel Rehabilitation Project began. Line 2 was completely shut down for roughly 15 months while the three other tunnels remained active.

Now that Line 2 is back online, Amtrak has said it will begin work on Line 1 this fall, shutting it down for approximately 13 months. The reconstructed tunnels are expected to last another 100 years.

Amtrak is repairing the tunnels' concrete lining and completely rebuilding their track beds, drainage systems, bench walls, cables and signals. Amtrak said it encountered worse damage than expected in Line 2, vindicating its decision to completely shut down the tunnels during reconstruction, rather than limiting work to the weekends or nighttime. The MTA had urged Amtrak to limit the scope of repairs, and blamed the shutdown for worsening delays caused by fires in the other tunnels earlier this year. But Amtrak has maintained that a full-time shutdown is necessary to do the job right.

The total cost for the two tunnels is approximately $1.6 billion, of which about $1.3 billion is federal money awarded by the Federal Railroad Administration using a grant from the bipartisan infrastructure package that President Joe Biden signed in 2021. The remainder of the funding comes from Amtrak, New Jersey Transit and the MTA. 

By Peter Gill

peter.gill@newsday.com