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Touring the East Side Access Tunnel, Surrounded By Schist

2:46 PM EDT on July 17, 2008

This morning I took a tour of the MTA's newly completed East Side Access tunnel 140 feet below Midtown Manhattan. My laptop is about to run out of batteries and, of course, I left my power cord at home. (It's a good thing I'm only in charge of running a blog and not, say, a 22-foot diameter, 850-ton tunnel boring machine.) So I'm just going to publish these photos with minimal text. I'll fill in the details later. Warning: If you're not a serious infrastructure geek, you might just want to skip this post altogether.

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Joe Trainor, MTA Capital Construction

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Sixteen flights down.

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Reminds me of a Merle Travis song.

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The "man car." Not the fanciest press junket.

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Heading southbound towards Grand Central.

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Left curve end. Right curve start. 

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Digger.

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Blow torch.

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Manhattan schist.

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Sandhogs.

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Drill tip.

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 Drill tip and worker.

Back to 63rd Street and 2nd Avenue in all of its sweltering, stylish, SUV-choked glory.

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