How To Dig a Train Tunnel Under the Hudson River (from HISTORY This Week)

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1:40Pushkit. Too quick? No, it was perfect. Pushkit. Stop. You got it. Hey, it's Jacob. Today we are putting in the feed an episode of a podcast hosted by the great Sally Helm, who Robert and I used to work with at Planet Money and who now hosts a show called History This Week. This episode is near to us. It's about the decision that the Pennsylvania Railroad made at the turn of the 20th century to dig a mile-long tunnel under the Hudson River. The project was a gamble, a gamble on new technology and new engineering and new ways of thinking about how people and goods move across continents. And today, the descendants of that tunnel under the Hudson River have become a national political flashpoint.

2:28The show is History This Week. It's from The History Channel, and I hope you like it. The History Channel original podcast. History This Week, February 14th, 1905. I'm Sally Helm.

2:50There is one thing standing between Alexander Cassatt and greatness.

2:59Cassatt is the president of the Pennsylvania Railroad. As of 1900, it is the largest corporation in the world. But his trains can't get into one of the largest cities in the world. New York. They get to New Jersey and can't go any further. Passengers have to get off and catch a ferry to get into Manhattan. And for Alexander Cassatt, this is galling, undignified. It's not befitting of the Great Pennsylvania Railroad. He wants to be able to bring his trains into New York. This will allow him to transport commuters, sure, but also to ultimately connect all of what is today called the Northeast Corridor.

3:45It'll become a vital link in a continuous rail line from Florida to Quebec. The one thing standing in his way is the Hudson River.

4:01The Hudson River in this spot is less than a mile wide. It shouldn't be so difficult to cross. And Alexander Cassatt knows how he wants to do it. With an underground tunnel.

4:17Unfortunately, it turns out to be very, very hard to build a tunnel under the Hudson. The earth is goopy, but there are also random boulders scattered in the mud, left over from glaciers 18 ,000 years earlier. It is an engineering nightmare. And on this day, February 14th, all of those problems become very, very public.

4:49Around 11 a.m., one of the men working underground detonates a stick of dynamite.

4:58That is nothing out of the ordinary. These men, known as the Sand Hogs, have dynamite as one of the tools in their arsenal. one of the ways to get through all that gloopy earth underneath the Hudson. But this time... The ground above them starts rumbling, making a muttering noise. They start to back away, and mud begins to pour through the walls of the tunnel. Then, water.

5:40On the surface in the train yard, two men are pulling coal along some tracks. When suddenly, they see those tracks begin to disappear into the earth. They leap from their posts, just as a whole locomotive is swallowed up by a 50-foot-wide sinkhole.

6:09Thankfully, and surprisingly, no one is killed. The men underground manage to escape. The Weehawken sinkhole is less a tragedy and more just an embarrassment for the Pennsylvania Railroad. One of the largest corporations in world history being stymied by mud. Poor Alexander Cassatt is said to have remarked in frustration that you could see Manhattan from the end of the company's tracks. You just couldn't reach it. We must, he said, find a way to cross. Today, train tunnels under the Hudson. How did an engineer turned horse breeder turned corporate executive overcome seemingly unsolvable technological problems to build these underground tunnels?

7:04And how did they become arguably the most important train tunnels in the world?

7:13The Pennsylvania Railroad was this famous, enormous corporation. In 1900, the only organization in the country with a bigger budget was the federal government. And the Pennsylvania Railroad was said to be a real, actual meritocracy. Alexander Cassatt begins at the bottom, like everyone did in the railroad. That's Jill Jones, a historian who wrote a book about this tunnel project. She said Cassatt started out at the company as a surveyor's assistant, earning a dollar a day. But he had a meteoric rise because the man was brilliant. He had a superhuman memory. He was known to reel off obscure bookkeeping facts off the top of his head.

7:59He was also good with machines. One of his longtime managers said that sometimes Cassatt could be found running a train all on his own while its engineer took a break. Cassatt has a storied career at the company. But at age 42, as vice president of the railroad, he retires to raise and breed horses. Pretty good life. And the alternative? Becoming president of the Pennsylvania Railroad? It did not look all that appealing. The job of president of Pennsylvania was so demanding and so stressful that it was literally referred to as a killing job. Presidents of the Pennsylvania Railroad generally died young in office.

8:46So Cassatt left, and a man named George Roberts was president. And he died. Another man took his place. He died. And the railroad was really struggling, basically because America was booming, and there was so much freight. And they just, they were overwhelmed. So in 1899, the railroad comes to him and asks him to come back as president. Basically, Alexander, you're our only hope. The board literally goes to find him in the field where he is exercising one of his horses. And he agrees. But he says he'll need free reign to improve things, to expand. And pretty immediately, he directs his focus to a mile-wide river, the Hudson.

9:48Cassatt wants his trains to cross it.

9:57America's biggest and most important city at the time, New York, has some geographical features that it can be kind of easy to forget about. We have this wackadoodle place where we're on all these islands. That is Polly Desjardins, content and research manager at the New York Transit Museum, reminding us that Manhattan is an island, one of several that makes up New York City. At this period of time, this is the thing. How are we connecting these places? You know, ferries do it for a while. Yeah, at this point, if you were a passenger on a Pennsylvania railroad train and you wanted to travel to the biggest city in the country, you would have to get off in New Jersey and hop on a ferry.

10:40With all your stuff, with all the other passengers, you'd navigate the crowded river waters, dodging huge steamships and tiny sloops and delivery boats and pleasure yachts. And one of the great surprises to me when I worked on this book was to realize how incredibly crowded the waters were.

11:03But you make it through, and then you get off at West Street, which was just total bedlam. You know, muddy and messy, and the whole thing did not comport with the way the Pennsylvania Railroad saw itself. At least they weren't the only ones. The other railroad companies also had to dump the passengers off in New Jersey and put them on a ferry. all the other companies except for one. It was very, very galling to the Pennsylvania Railroad that their greatest rival, the Vanderbilts and the New York Central Railroad, was the lone railroad whose passengers came in across a bridge. Across a bridge. Much more dignified.

11:56The Vanderbilts and their New York Central Railroad had built a short bridge crossing into Manhattan from the north. Now, the New York Central had nowhere near the national network of the Pennsylvania Railroad. And in some ways, their trains were nothing to be jealous of. These are coal-fired steam locomotives. And if you have not been around such a train, you don't have a clue what that pollution is like. These trains would billow black smoke as they chugged along, getting in everyone's eyes. The Vanderbilt trains did briefly go underground into short tunnels right before pulling into Grand Central Station.

12:37But this could actually create another problem. They were billowing smoke. They were very noisy. That is Andy Sparberg, transit historian and 25-year veteran of the Long Island Railroad. He told us about one particularly horrible incident in these tunnels.

13:01One train rear-ended another because of the lack of visibility. It missed a signal and plowed into the rear of a train that was stopped ahead. Fifteen people were killed. These trains produced so much pollution that they would cloud up the tunnel, making it impossible to see what was in front of them.

13:26Alexander Cassatt has a solution to all of this. A grand bridge across the Hudson. 14 train tracks plus lanes for pedestrians and carriages. 500-foot towers. A span suspended 185 feet in the air to allow huge ships to pass underneath. It would be the largest bridge in the world. Engineering News wrote, The next year, the entire thing is off. Yeah, the price tag was$100 million. Turns out, that's too high. It's now the summer of 1901. And Cassatt is at a loss. He doesn't know how to get his trains across the Hudson. So he takes a trip to France, which is supposed to be a vacation, but turns out to be a work trip.

14:25It is there that he will find his solution.

14:37Alexander Cassatt goes to France to visit his sister, Mary Cassatt, the now legendary Impressionist painter. When he is identified today, he's identified as her brother, which would have been astonishing to people at that time because she did not register at all. While he's there, Alexander gets a message from his vice president, Samuel Ray. He gets a telegraph from Ray saying, you know what, go look at the Gar-Cay d 'Orsay. The d 'Orsay station had just opened in Paris. Today, it has actually been turned into an art museum that houses some Mary Cassatt paintings. But back then, it is a massive palatial train hub.

15:26Seven limestone archways serve as entrances. Sculptures adorn the exterior. Lion's heads, laurel leaves. And inside, there is no smoke. When he saw this, I mean, he got it immediately. The trains pulling into this station are all electric. And they're coming through tunnels along the Seine River, without blinding their conductors with billowing black smoke. Alexander Cassatt sees his future. It's like we, we could come into Manhattan under the river with these electric locomotives.

16:17Cassatt springs into action. On his way home from Europe, he recruits Charles Jacobs, an upbeat Englishman and one of the world's foremost tunneling experts. Along with his vice president, Samuel Ray, they begin to plan. To connect the two coasts of the Hudson with an underground tunnel. They'll start on both sides of the river simultaneously. And they will come at each other to meet in the middle, far below the riverbed. This tunnel will lead to a new train station as monumental as the one in Paris. It'll be named after the railroad, Penn Station. At first, the company is operating in secrecy.

17:05Partly because they're buying up all this land for Penn Station and they want to get a good deal. People might demand more if they know what it's for. But also because they want to stay beneath the notice of the vast political machine that runs New York. Tammany Hall. Tammany was just, it was a never-ending search for bribes and boodle and, you know, rake-off and whatever. Tammany Hall has been in power for a long time, but they have actually just recently suffered a setback. They were caught rigging the city's ice market. Ice is the main method of refrigeration at this time. And when people find out that Tammany is making money off ice while the common man's food spoils, there's an uproar.

17:50So much so that New York elects a mayor who isn't in Tammany's pocket, a reformer named Seth Lowe. But Lowe doesn't control the city's board of aldermen, a.k.a. the 40 Thieves. It actually has 79 members, and they're not all thieves, but Tammany has a majority in their pocket. And the Pennsylvania Railroad will need permission from the 40 Thieves to build their station. When they do go public, Tammany essentially announces their price. They let it be known that the bribe or the boodle would be$300 ,000. But Alexander Cassatt is not having it. He's like, I am not paying that. This project is going to be a huge deal for New York.

18:41Like, it would be absurd to kill it. The proposal goes before the board of aldermen. And they vote it down. No boodle, no approval. But Tammany, remember, is a little bit on the outs, and people get really mad about this. The New York Times. There is not an honest hair in the head of one of them, meaning the alderman. Scientific American. One of the most shame-faced exhibitions of political tyranny that ever disgraced the city. And Cassatt turns up the pressure. The Pennsylvania Railroad has said, look, if you don't give us this franchise by this date, that's it, because we have invested all this money and we cannot sit around.

19:24So if you don't give us this, we're gone and we're sorry, but, you know, we were very straight with you. And New York City really does want this project. The reform-minded mayor, Seth Lowe, takes some of the aldermen out on his personal yacht to woo them. He writes each of them a heartfelt letter for their yes votes. And on December 16th, 1902, the Board of Aldermen needs to vote again.

19:51And just enough of the 40 thieves break ranks with Tammany. The Board approves Alexander Cassatt's audacious plan.

20:05I feel like today, building an underwater tunnel sounds like, oh yeah, I don't know, we probably have technology to do that. But this was actually so, so hard. I mean, think about it. The tunnel is underwater. How do you build that without getting flooded? What they did was pump compressed air into the tunnel as they built it. So the water is pushing in, but the air is pushing back out. That worked. But it made for a very specific and dangerous environment.

20:48If you want access to the Hudson River Tunnel site in 1903, first you take an elevator.

21:03You walked out and into the airlock where you would sit for 15 minutes while it filled up with compressed air and you got acclimated. If you didn't do that, you might get the bends, like what scuba divers can get. If you go down too quickly, you can get intense ear pain and brain fog, if you come up too quickly, dangerous bubbles can form in your blood. When you emerged, it was like this hellish, very small space. The workers, the sandhogs, are pushing the tunnel forward inch by inch. It was really wet, really muddy, and really chaotic under the tunnels. I mean, it was a very controlled, orchestrated chaos.

21:59At the very front of the tunnel space is this giant piece of machinery called the Great Head Shield. It almost looks like a piece of a rocket ship or something. Essentially, you have workers within this shield. Polly Desjardins. They are picking away, digging shovels, pickaxes, whatever. These compartments open up at the front of the shield, letting the workers clear all the silt and rock. Once that's out of the way, they install these rings. Sections of cast iron, which was the tunnel lining, and then they would sort of rivet all of those together. Once the tunnel walls are in place, the great head shield activates these huge hydraulic jacks and lurches forward.

22:51Two and a half feet. And the workers start the whole process over again.