LOL, quoteable quote from another article I read from Amtraks own OIG. "Having Amtrak manage the Gateway Projects would be roughly analgous to hiring a handyman to build your house".
https://www.northjersey.com/story/news/transportation/2022/02/08/amtrak-oig-officials-improve-oversight-gateway/6690232001/
Yeah, but what they actually mean is this:
Remember the old adage about 'the men who manage men manage the men who manage things'? And its logical cynical extension 'the men who manage money manage the men who manage men'?
The call is for Amtrak to follow the pointedly successful and effective California model and hire consultants to manage the men and things involved with Gateway, including the watchdog site-architect multitudes necessary to get anything built in the New York environment.
I could say, more than a littly cynically, that the skill set necessary to accomplish that ought to exist at Amtrak, as they have by repute a somewhat bloated staff experienced in the ways of political accommodation and navigating bureaucracy successfully. But they need hard-as-nails project and site managers who will get the thing done and be throwable under the bus afterward when the omelets have been made. In other words, people who have no interest in a career at Amtrak.
Where the real project management is going to be applied is in the renovation of the existing North River tunnels once the Gateway bore is completed. Once an individual track can be taken out of service on an extended basis, both equipment and techniques to remediate the structure to 22nd-Century longevity become straightforward, and potentially the project can be executed safely, with all necessary union accommodations, in no more than a matter of months or weeks.
We have seen that tunnel work of this kind, specifically including recabling, can be done effectively and thoughtfully -- in the subways. Theoretically Amtrak need look no further than a couple of those people as consultants on getting it done.
Overmod: Do not forget that Gateway tunnel is actually 2 separate bores connected by fire resistant cross passageways about evey 800 feet. My take on 800 is that most trains will be somewhat longer than 800 so some part of any train will be abeam of a passage way?
Suspect passage ways are a big expense having to be dug by hand?
I do now not remember the detail construction. I lost interest when it stopped being high-speed as soon as you got into the box coming out of Penn. You have much less of an 'air piston' effect with fast trains in tight bores when you have many cross-passages to relieve the pressure or 'fill in' the vacuum wake.
I suspect you are justified in thinking that the cross-passages will be spaced so that at least a couple of sets of doors in a given trainset would always be near-adjacent to a passage. It becomes less necessary to provide 'walking space' between the train and the bore lining if you could walk through the train instead. Of course, if the train stops it may already be on fire, or in the cloud of smoke from another that is, and it may not be easy to move the passengers through only a few doors in the consist...
I suspect the bores themselves would be built using TBMs, with the "subportals" of the cross passages cas as part of the slip-forming, and smaller equipment used to drive and perhaps line the passageways as the work gets to the point a new cross-passage can be opened. Whether they drive one bore and then use it to accelerate spoil from the other, I don't know.
I have to wonder if the 'new' alignment couldn't just as well be served with an ARC tunnel-like single bore with two partitioned tracks and the service passages above and below...
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