New York expanding nation's biggest transit hub

Source: AP-Excite

VERENA DOBNIK

NEW YORK (AP) - Sixteen stories below Grand Central Terminal, an army of workers is blasting through bedrock to create a new commuter rail concourse with more floor space than New Orleans' Superdome, just one of three audacious projects going on beneath New York City's streets to expand what's already the nation's biggest mass transit system.

But even with blasting and machinery grinding through the rock day and night, most New Yorkers are blithely unaware of the construction or the eerie underworld that includes a massive, eight-story cavern, miles of tunnels and watery, gravel-filled pits.

"I look at it and I'm in wonder, I'm in awe," says engineer Michael Horodniceanu, president of capital construction for the state Metropolitan Transportation Authority. "I feel like when I went to Rome and entered St. Peter's Basilica for the first time. ... I looked at it and said, 'Wow, how did they do that?'"

In New York, they hauled out so much rocky debris from under Grand Central that it could have covered Central Park almost a foot deep, Horodniceanu says.

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Read more: http://apnews.excite.com/article/20130207/DA49M3O02.html

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In this undated artist’s rendering provided by the Metropolitan Transportation Authority in New York, the Mezzanine node of the Second Avenue Subway at 46th Street in New York City is shown. The Second Avenue Subway is being built to ease rider congestion on Lexington Avenue trains. (AP Photo/Metropolitan Transportation Authority)