Howard Street Tunnel Clearance and Modernization Project

You cannot raise the roof of an 1895 brick tunnel under downtown Baltimore, so CSX lowered the floor instead. The Howard Street Tunnel runs 8,700 feet from Mount Royal Station south to Camden, and its 19-foot clearance was the single reason double-stack container trains could not leave the Port of Baltimore heading west. Clearance is now about 21 feet. The tunnel reopened formally on 22 June 2026, and substantial completion landed on 30 September 2025, nearly two years ahead of the original August 2027 date.

Project Scope

Crews demolished and excavated the historic invert, then set roughly 1,200 precast concrete slabs 18 to 19 feet across to form a new floor, plus new drainage, all without damaging the original brick archway. A custom gantry crane with a railcar-shaped mouth handled the slabs inside the bore. The Skanska–Fay Joint Venture, pairing Skanska USA Civil with Fay, an S&B USA Construction company, worked around the clock through a seven-and-a-half-month continuous tunnel outage. The wider program also cleared 21 additional vertical obstructions across Maryland, Delaware and Pennsylvania. STV ran program and construction management with Michael Baker International; Hatch handled engineering. The design-build contract came in at $293 million against a program cost of about $495 million, funded by Maryland, Pennsylvania, the City of Baltimore, CSX and a Federal Railroad Administration grant.

Why It Matters

Progressive design-build is what made the outage window survivable. Fixing the price after design development, rather than bidding a set of drawings for a structure nobody had fully seen since the 1890s, is the only sane way to handle a 130-year-old brick tunnel under a live city. The finish date is the argument: nearly two years early on a job where the unknowns were all underground.

Project Team & Details