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Guy Lawrence / ENR New track alignment and new station will upgrade South Ferry subway stop to modern-day standards.

Crews are plugging along on a key New York Metropolitan Transportation Authority subway modernization, with electrical workers stringing and connecting hundreds of feet of copper wire, fiber-optic cables and utilities within a new structural box. It will become a new station that, when in operation this fall, will allow 10-car trains rather than five-car trains to stop at the platforms, serving 6 million annual passengers at Manhattan’s southern tip.

The $500-million federally funded reconstruction of the South Ferry Terminal station, originally built in 1905, included a $261-million design-build contract for the reinforced-concrete structural box, which accommodates a 1,200-ft-long approach tunnel and the 500-ft-long new station.

The design-build job was won in 2005 by a joint venture of Schiavone Construction Co., Secaucus, N.J., and Granite Halmar Construction Co. Inc., Tarrytown, N.Y. Schiavone design manager Jim Szeluga says the job included a 1,700-ft-long open-cut excavation through Battery Park, with crews removing about 77,000 cu yd of material. In the process, they unearthed three historic seawalls and an old bulkhead. “We would stand aside while the archeologists came in and exposed the walls,” notes Szeluga.

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The team had to tunnel and mine down to 80 ft, underneath three existing, active subway lines and the existing station, first underpinning the structures with about 200 minipiles, 9.5 in. in diameter and socketed into rock during 52-hour weekend outages, says Szeluga.

The old station, located just south of the new one, loops around in a noose shape that only accommodates the first five cars of each train, requiring customers in the rear cars to walk forward to exit. The platform curvature, which caused the train wheels to screech, requires mechanical “gap fillers” to bridge the space between the platform and the train doors.

DURG

Judlau Contracting Inc., College Point, N.Y., holds a $120-million contract for station finishes, including furnishing and installing power, signaling, lighting, communications, rail and ties, elevators and ventilation for over 1,600 ft of new track.

With Manhattan’s financial center nearby, the ongoing work is especially crucial. Up to 80 phone lines might be encased in one 12-ft-wide concrete duct bank, note MTA officials. “Almost 60% of the work is electrical,” says Uday Durg, MTA program manager.

“Our members are running thousands of feet of conduit,” adds Michael O’Neill, business representative for the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, Local 3. Two electrical distribution rooms, circuit-breaker houses, signal and communications rooms and an emergency control room all have to be wired and connected to the existing subway.