The contract closed June 1. The Gateway Development Commission awarded the Hudson Tunnel Project’s New Jersey Surface Alignment package to a Skanska Creamer Sanzari joint venture for $711,669,000, putting a price on one of the last big land-side pieces of the Hudson River rail crossing.
It’s not the glamorous part. The surface alignment doesn’t bore under the river. What it does is build roughly 1.5 miles of new track structure from County Road in Secaucus to the tunnel portal at Tonnelle Avenue in North Bergen, the stretch that lets trains coming out of the new tube reach the Northeast Corridor. Without it, the tunnel is a very expensive hole in the ground.
What the surface alignment package covers
The NJSA scope sits between two things that grab more headlines: the new Hudson River Tunnel itself and the rebuilt Portal bridges to the west. The Gateway Development Commission says seven of the 10 construction packages that make up the Hudson Tunnel Project are now in progress or finished, so this award moves the program toward a continuous build rather than a set of disconnected contracts.
Skanska Creamer Sanzari came through a competitive proposal review by an evaluation panel drawn from the GDC, New York State, NJ Transit, and Amtrak. Construction is expected to begin later in 2026.
Why a rail approach costs $712 million
Surface work near an active corridor is rarely cheap. Crews have to build new alignment without knocking out service on tracks that move hundreds of thousands of riders a day, which means staged construction, temporary supports, and a lot of night work. The number reflects that constraint more than it reflects raw mileage.
The Gateway Program has had a rough decade of funding fights, and a stalled federal commitment once pushed the whole thing into limbo. That backdrop makes each clean award read as a small vote of confidence. The full award detail is at Engineering News-Record. The next packages to watch are the remaining three.