East Side Access project delayed –– again

Long Island Rail Road riders waiting for the East Side Access project to Grand Central Terminal will have to hold out even longer than expected –– an additional six years to be exact.

Metropolitan Transportation Authority officials announced on May 21 that the new completion date for the project would likely be in August of 2019, as compared to the initial assessment of 2013. Tunneling and work on both the Manhattan and Queens sides of the project began in 2007.

This isn’t the first time that the project has faced setbacks. In the summer of 2011, the estimated completion date was pushed back to 2016.

Once completed, LIRR trains will travel through a new network of tunnels underneath Amtrak’s Sunnyside Yard to the 63rd Street tunnel below the East River. The trains will then head south to Grand Central at 42nd Street. An estimated 162,000 riders a day will use eight platforms to arrive and depart from Manhattan’s East Side.

In addition to the delay, officials also announced that the cost of the project would be $8.24 billion, up from the initial estimate of $6.3 billion in 2006. The increase in both time and expenditure estimates comes from a study by Dr. Michael Horodniceanu, president of MTA Capital Construction. The study found that the initial assessment of the project could only be completed with 20 percent certainty. The updated project comes with a higher price, but a higher certainty that it will be completed by the promised date.

“We now have an 80 percent confidence the project will be completed with $8.2 billion by August 2019,” MTA spokesman Aaron Donovan said.

A main cause for the delay revolves around complicated construction work at the Sunnyside Yard in Queens. A maze of switches in the Harold Interlocking area controls trains for the LIRR, New Jersey Transit and Amtrak. Nearly 800 trains pass through the series of signals and switches daily. It is the busiest rail switching control area in the United States.