The Downtown Hudson Tubes (formerly the Cortlandt Street Tunnel[2]) are a pair of tunnels that carry PATH trains under the Hudson River in the United States, between New York City to the east and Jersey City, New Jersey, to the west. The tunnels run between the World Trade Center station on the New York side and the Exchange Place station on the New Jersey side.
PATH operates two services through the Downtown Tubes, Newark–World Trade Center and Hoboken–World Trade Center. The former normally operates 24/7, while the latter only operates on weekdays.[3]
The Downtown Hudson Tubes use a roughly east-southeast to west-northwest path under the Hudson River, connecting Manhattan in the east with Jersey City in the west. Each track is located in its own tube,[1] which enables better ventilation by the so-called piston effect. When a train passes through the tunnel it pushes out the air in front of it toward the closest ventilation shaft, and also pulls air into the rail tunnel from the closest ventilation shaft behind it.[4][5] The diameter of both downtown tubes is 15 feet 3 inches (4.65 m).[6][5] The underwater section of the tubes is about 5,700 feet (1,737 m) in total.[1][5] The tubes were formed by segmental circular linings of cast-steel, bolted together at the rear of the excavating shields as the shields were driven forward. The tubes are lined with concrete below the top of the cable ducts, and are unlined above these ducts.[5]
On the Manhattan end, the tubes were connected by a balloon loop. The loop fanned out to include five tracks served by six platforms. This layout was built during the construction of the original Hudson Terminal, and a similar layout existed in two of the successive World Trade Center PATH stations that replaced it.[7]: 59–60 The current World Trade Center PATH station includes four platforms, but the general track layout, with the five-track balloon loop, is otherwise similar to that of the previous World Trade Center stations.[8]: S.10 [9]
The tunnels were the second non-waterborne connection between Manhattan and New Jersey, after the Uptown Hudson Tubes.[7]: 15 The idea for the downtown tunnels was devised by another company in 1903, the Hudson and Manhattan Railroad Corporation (H&M). However, William Gibbs McAdoo's New York and Jersey Railroad Company, which was constructing the Uptown Tubes, was interested in the H&M tunnel.[10] Early in the planning process, there were elaborate reports that the Pennsylvania Railroad (PRR) was interested in operating its trains through the Downtown Hudson Tubes, so that the PRR's New York Penn Station could be used solely for non-terminating trains. However, McAdoo denied these rumors, saying, "the Pennsylvania has not one dollar's interest" in such a venture.[11] In January 1905, the Hudson Companies was incorporated for the purpose of completing the Uptown Hudson Tubes. The Hudson Companies would also build a pair of downtown tunnels between the Exchange Place station, in Jersey City, and Hudson Terminal, at the corner of Church and Cortlandt Streets in Lower Manhattan. The company already had a capital of $21 million at the time of its incorporation.[12][13]