The contract closed in early May. Skanska USA Civil booked $1.06 billion in design-build work to replace the MBTA’s Draw One bridges across the Charles River and rebuild the rail approach into Boston’s North Station — one of the largest single MBTA awards of the past decade and the kind of complex, in-service rail rebuild that puts a real test on schedule risk.
The existing Draw One bridges date to 1930. They’re double-leaf bascules, opened by a system that has long outlived the hardware around it, and the steel and approach trestles have been on borrowed time for years. Skanska’s scope replaces them with new vertical-lift spans, doubles capacity on the crossing from four tracks to six, and adds a new Platform F inside North Station to absorb the throughput.
What the design-build scope actually covers
There’s a tendency to talk about bridge replacements as if the bridge itself is the job. It isn’t. The bridge is the visible part. The harder work is the approach trestles, the new Tower A signal and dispatch facility, and the staging that keeps the more than 100,000 daily Newburyport, Rockport, Haverhill, Lowell and Fitchburg riders moving while a 96-year-old movable bridge gets cut apart and lifted out over a navigable channel.
Phased outages instead of a full shutdown also drives the structural sequencing. Skanska’s team will build the new spans alongside the existing bascules where geometry allows, then swing service onto the new alignment in stages. That’s a much harder construction problem than a clean-slate replacement, and it explains the 2032 substantial-completion date for a job that would otherwise be a three- or four-year build.
The contract is being booked in Skanska’s Q2 2026 U.S. order intake — material at a corporate level for a contractor that’s been leaning into North American civil work as European margins compress.
Why the timing matters
This award arrives in a stretch where MBTA capital spending has shifted from emergency slow-zone removal to genuine state-of-good-repair megaprojects. The North Station capacity expansion connects directly to long-discussed plans for North-South Rail Link and any future regional-rail-style service pattern on the north side: you can’t run more frequent service through a four-track choke point on bridges from the Hoover administration.
For the regional construction market, the Draw One award also pulls a significant chunk of skilled civil labor — divers, steel erectors, signal crews — into a single corridor for six years. Expect that to ripple through bid prices on adjacent Boston-area infrastructure work through 2028.
Skanska hasn’t named subcontractors yet, but the design-build delivery model gives the JV more flexibility on phasing than a strict design-bid-build award would. Watch for the structural steel and signaling subcontracts to be the first major tier-two announcements out of the project.