Boston’s busiest rail chokepoint is getting rebuilt. The Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority awarded a $1.06 billion design-build contract to a Skanska Civil Northeast and Koch joint venture to replace the Draw One bridges, the aging movable spans that carry commuter rail over the Charles River into North Station.
A 1930s bridge past its life
Draw One dates to the early 20th century and carries the heaviest concentration of commuter-rail traffic in New England. Every northside line funnels across it. The replacement swaps worn movable spans for new structures built to modern seismic and flood standards, work that has to happen while trains keep running above an active waterway.
Another megabridge for Skanska
The award adds to a busy year of nine-figure rail-bridge work for Skanska, which is also building rail infrastructure across the Northeast corridor. Phased construction over an operating right-of-way is the hard part, and it’s where design-build earns its keep: one team owns both the sequencing and the risk. For riders on the north side, it removes a single point of failure that has quietly capped how much service the MBTA can run.
Boston has leaned on federal infrastructure money to tackle a backlog of these deferred structural projects. Draw One was near the top of the list.