The F train will return to Roosevelt Island Monday morning after seven months of track work and other repairs shut down the MTA’s 63rd Street tunnel.
The work, which included structural repairs, new rails and new signaling, is the first major overhaul of the tunnel since it opened more than three decades ago.
“We rebuilt the concrete foundation, the ties, the running rails, the third rail, and all of the signals equipment along 25,000 feet [of track],” MTA’s construction and development head Jamie Torres-Springer said Thursday during a tour of the Lexington Ave.-63rd St. station.
As he spoke, crews could be seen checking track alignment ahead of a weekend of signal testing before the reopening.
The work took place along the 63rd St. line of the IND, a tunnel stretching from the 57th St.-Sixth Ave. station in Midtown, across the East River, through Roosevelt Island, and connecting to the Queens Blvd. line at the 36th St. Station in Astoria.
The tunnel’s partial shutdown in August was “unavoidable,” NYC Transit President Rich Davey told the Daily News at the time. Concrete plinths supporting the tracks had begun to crack, as had portions of the tunnel’s bench wall.
As is the case in various portions of the system, teams also had to address leaks in the tunnel.
The repairs gave the MTA the opportunity to make some improvements as well, Torres-Springer said.
The ties set in the new concrete are now composite, and should last longer than their wooden counterparts, he said.
The signaling system, though still using the MTA’s traditional block-signals rather than modern computer signaling, has been refreshed with new equipment and wiring.
While the old rail was installed in 40-foot sections, the trains that start running on Monday will run over sections of rail that are 400 feet long, and welded together along the length of the track in an effort to smooth out the ride between sections.
“Just the way the ties and the rails are fixed to the foundation, you have much less vibration,” Torres-Springer said. “We’re also able to achieve faster speeds with it. It’s going to be a much smoother and improved ride.”
The project has required a reroute of the F and M lines over the past seven months, with the M terminating at 57th St. in Midtown and the F continuing into Queens via the M line’s 53rd St. tunnel.
Roosevelt Island residents have been reliant on daytime shuttle train service running on a single track at 20-minute intervals.
While the completion of the 63rd Street line’s overhaul is of great practical importance to Queens commuters, the project also holds symbolic importance as the MTA gears up to release its 2025-2030 capital budget by the end of the year — a budget expected to consist largely of repair and replacement projects.
First conceived of as part of the Queens “superexpress” of the MTA’s 1968 Program for Action expansion plan, the 63rd Street line stalled during the fiscal crisis of the 1970s, along with other troubled projects like the still-ongoing Second Ave. subway.
The tunnel itself was largely complete by 1976 — including the pre-fab sections lowered into the East River on either side of Roosevelt Island — but it sat dormant through much of the 1980s, becoming something of a poster child for Transit’s money woes.
By the time a truncated version of the line was opened in 1989, the 63rd St. IND brought subways from Midtown, through Roosevelt Island and into Queens — but dead-ended near the Queensbridge houses in Long Island City, earning the line the derisive nickname, “the tunnel to nowhere.”
The line wasn’t connected to the main Queens Blvd. line — and therefore greater Queens — until 2001.
“That project was really an exception to the rule,” said Joe Rappaport, who headed the Straphangers’ Campaign, a riders advocacy group, in the 1980s and 90s. “The MTA was trying to expand service even a small amount after years of stagnation — there had really been nothing new since the 1930s.”
By contrast, the overhaul comes at a time when the MTA is projecting financial stability. Agency brass have said they expect no operating-budget deficits for the next five years, and MTA chairman Janno Lieber expressed confidence last week that a long-awaited congestion pricing program — responsible for $1 billion a year in revenue for the agency’s capital budget — will go into effect in June, regardless of ongoing legal challenges.
Meanwhile, Torres-Springer’s team is at work building a budget for the next five years of capital projects, the bulk of which is expected to focus on so-called “state-of-good-repair” — the replacement or maintenance of the transit systems aging stations, rolling stock, power systems, communication systems, signaling systems and more.
“This is an approach that we’re taking which hasn’t been taken before, to address the literal underlying problems of the proper functioning of the system in non-band-aid sorts of ways,” Torres-Springer said of the 63rd St. line overhaul.
“We looked at this and we said, ‘It continues to deteriorate — we need to make the hard decision to take out service in order to replace all of the infrastructure in here so it lasts for a very long time,’” he said. “That’s the approach that we’re taking across the capital program.”
But the agency’s 20-year needs assessment, released last year, is meant to set the priorities for the upcoming capital plan.
In that assessment, MTA officials didn’t put a dollar figure on the necessary work — but they painted the picture of a system in need of extensive maintenance.
On the subways, 75% of electrical substations will be need replacement in the coming years, the report said, and could bring “extended power outages across the system” if left untended.
According to the report, 39% of subway cars on the numbered subway lines will reach the end of their useful lives during the next capital plan. All nine of the system’s pump cars and all five of its snow removal cars are due for replacement.
The budget for that program — and the list of the MTA’s priority projects for the next five years — is expected to be completed and made public by the end of 2024.
“The MTA in the ’90s used to talk about doing more with less,” said Rappaport, the former head of the Straphangers’ Campaign.
If the agency’s financial fortunes hold, he said, the question becomes, “how is the MTA going to do more with more?”
