The deal closed in May. The MBTA awarded a $1.06 billion design-build contract to Skanska USA Civil to tear down the 1930s-era Charles River bascule bridges at North Station and replace them with new vertical-lift spans, in what’s now the largest single rail contract the agency has issued this decade.
VHB joins Skanska as lead designer on the job, which the MBTA refers to as the North Station Draw 1 Bridge Replacement. Construction starts immediately and is targeted for delivery in 2032.
What the contract actually covers
Draw 1 isn’t one bridge. It’s a cluster of three connected drawbridges built between 1931 and 1933 that carry every commuter rail movement in and out of North Station across the Charles. The existing bascule design is past its service life, and the moving spans have been the single biggest reliability headache on the north-side commuter rail network for years.
Skanska’s scope replaces those spans with six new tracks on vertical-lift bridges, plus signal and track work running across Boston, Cambridge, and Somerville. The lift-span geometry adds clearance for marine traffic without the maintenance demands of a bascule mechanism.
Federal money is doing a lot of the lifting here. The U.S. Department of Transportation announced a $472.3 million Mega grant for the broader Draw 1 effort in October 2024, and the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law remains the source of the federal share. The rest comes from the state.
Why Skanska, and what it means for the bid market
Skanska’s win is the headline, but the structure of the award matters as much as the dollar value. Boston’s project labor agreement, signed earlier this year, cleared the last political risk on the procurement and let the MBTA put a clean design-build package out for bid. Pricing came in close enough to the engineer’s estimate that the agency didn’t have to rebid.
For the JV market, the takeaway is that single-firm design-build prime awards at this scale are still landing in the Northeast. Skanska USA Civil’s recent run has been heavy on partnership work. The Penn Station rebuild went to Halmar / Skanska, and Hudson Tunnel Package 1C went to a Traylor / Walsh / Skanska JV. Draw 1 breaks that pattern. The MBTA wanted a single accountable contractor on a politically sensitive North Station program, and Skanska had the bonding capacity and the rail-bridge resume to take it solo.
What to watch
Two things over the next 12 months. First, how Skanska sequences the bridge work without disrupting commuter rail service into North Station: the existing spans have to keep carrying trains until the new structures are ready, which complicates the demolition window. Second, whether the 2032 delivery target survives the early-construction phase intact. MBTA megaprojects have not historically held first-pass schedules.
If the early work goes clean, the Draw 1 award sets a useful comp for the next round of bridge-replacement design-builds across the Northeast Corridor.
Source: Engineering News-Record.