250px, The ASCE plaque in Jefferson Station 250px, City plaque in Jefferson Station The Center City Commuter Connection, (CCCC) commonly referred to as "the commuter tunnel", is a passenger railroad

tunnel A tunnel is an underground passageway, dug through surrounding soil, earth or rock, and enclosed except for the entrance and exit, commonly at each end. A pipeline is not a tunnel, though some recent tunnels have used immersed tube cons ...

Center City, Philadelphia Center City includes the central business district and central neighborhoods of Philadelphia. It comprises the area that made up the City of Philadelphia prior to the Act of Consolidation, 1854, which extended the city borders to be coterminous wi ...

, Pennsylvania, United States, built to connect the stub ends of the two separate regional commuter rail systems, originally operated by two rival railroad companies: the

Pennsylvania Railroad The Pennsylvania Railroad (reporting mark PRR), legal name The Pennsylvania Railroad Company also known as the "Pennsy", was an American Class I railroad that was established in 1846 and headquartered in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. It was named ...

and the

Reading Company The Reading Company ( ) was a Philadelphia-headquartered railroad that provided passenger and commercial rail transport in eastern Pennsylvania and neighboring states that operated from 1924 until its 1976 acquisition by Conrail. Commonly called ...

. All of the

SEPTA Regional Rail The SEPTA Regional Rail system is a commuter rail network owned by the Southeastern Pennsylvania Transportation Authority and serving the Philadelphia Metropolitan area. The system has 13 branches and more than 150 active stations in Philadelphi ...

lines except for the

Cynwyd Line The Cynwyd Line is a SEPTA Regional Rail line from Center City, Philadelphia, Center City Philadelphia to Cynwyd (SEPTA station), Cynwyd in Montgomery County, Pennsylvania, Montgomery County, Pennsylvania. Originally known as the Ivy Ridge Line, ...

pass completely through the four-track tunnel, which contains two underground stations,

Suburban Station Suburban Station is an art deco office building and underground commuter rail station in Penn Center, Philadelphia. Its official SEPTA address is 16th Street and JFK Boulevard. The station is owned and operated by SEPTA and is one of the three ...

and Jefferson Station, and the above-ground upper-level concourse for the east–west commuter lines serving

30th Street Station 3 (three) is a number, numeral and digit. It is the natural number following 2 and preceding 4, and is the smallest odd prime number and the only prime preceding a square number. It has religious or cultural significance in many societie ...

Planning and development

, located at 16th Street and JFK Boulevard, was the underground terminus of the

commuter rail Commuter rail, or suburban rail, is a passenger rail transport service that primarily operates within a metropolitan area, connecting commuters to a central city from adjacent suburbs or commuter towns. Generally commuter rail systems are con ...

lines of the

(PRR). The

(RDG) ran trains on an elevated approach above city streets into the

Reading Terminal The Reading Terminal ( ) is a complex of buildings that includes the former Reading Company main station located in the Market East section of Center City in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States. It comprises the Reading Terminal Headho ...

, located at 12th and Market Streets (one block west of where Jefferson Station was built). The connection, the first of its kind in the United States, was built to allow trains to run through Philadelphia's downtown central business district, by uniting the commuter lines of the two rail systems. R. Damon Childs was a junior land planner with the Philadelphia City Planning Commission when he proposed the CCCC to permit through-routing of the Pennsylvania Railroad and the

Reading Railroad The Reading Company ( ) was a Philadelphia-headquartered railroad that provided passenger and commercial rail transport in eastern Pennsylvania and neighboring states that operated from 1924 until its 1976 acquisition by Conrail. Commonly calle ...

suburban lines. There already was a 0.8-mile (1.3 km) subway from 16th Street to 20th Street, a portion of the trackage connecting Suburban Station with 30th Street Station to the west. The tunnel project extended four of Suburban Station's eight tracks 1.7 miles (2.7 km) eastward. The proposed tunnel addition would pass just north of City Hall and then pass over the

Broad Street Subway The Broad Street Line (BSL), also known as the Broad Street subway (BSS), Orange Line, or Broad Line, is a subway line owned by the city of Philadelphia and operated by the Southeastern Pennsylvania Transportation Authority (SEPTA). The line r ...

. The tracks would run under Filbert Street, would then curve to the north after 11th Street, pass under the Ridge Avenue Subway spur line, and run northward under 9th Street, ascending to join the Reading embankment near Spring Garden Street. Underground replacement for Reading Terminal—originally to be called 11th Street Station—was part of the Market East redevelopment project. At first the idea seemed preposterous because it required excavation under

Philadelphia City Hall Philadelphia City Hall is the seat of the municipal government of the City of Philadelphia. Built in the ornate Second Empire style, City Hall houses the chambers of the Philadelphia City Council and the offices of the Mayor of Philadelphia. It ...

, one of the most massive buildings in the world, but it was nevertheless incorporated by

Edmund N. Bacon Edmund Norwood Bacon (May 2, 1910October 14, 2005) was an American urban planner, architect, educator, and author. During his tenure as the executive director of the Philadelphia City Planning Commission from 1949 to 1970, his visions shaped to ...

into the city's 1960 Comprehensive Plan. Groundbreaking for the tunnel project was on June 22, 1978. It took six years to complete at a cost of $330 million (equivalent to $ billion in ). Federal funds, through the

Federal Transit Administration The Federal Transit Administration (FTA) is an agency within the United States Department of Transportation (DOT) that provides financial and technical assistance to local public transportation systems. The FTA is one of ten modal administration ...

(then called the Urban Mass Transportation Administration), paid for 80 percent of the project, state funds accounted for 16.66 percent, and city funds covered the remaining 3.33 percent. On April 28, 1984, a free shuttle service began operating between

and Market East Station. Trains on the former PRR lines began providing service through the connection to and from Market East on September 3, 1984. The last train from

departed on November 6, 1984. After allowing for final track connections to be made, trains from the former Reading Railroad began using the tunnel on November 10, 1984. The Center City Commuter Connection, the four-track (two tracks in both directions) standard-gauge rail link between Suburban Station and the new Market East Station, formally opened for business on November 12, 1984. The old approach to Reading Terminal was then abandoned. It is still mostly present, and is now known as the

Reading Viaduct The Reading Viaduct, also called The Rail Park, is a disused elevated rail line in the Callowhill district of Philadelphia that has been partly transformed into a rail trail. In 2010, the Center City District and a new community organization, F ...

, being actively converted (Phase 1 opened in 2018) to a

linear park A linear park is a type of park that is significantly longer than it is wide. These linear parks are strips of public land running along canals, rivers, streams, defensive walls, electrical lines, or highways and shorelines. Examples of linear p ...

. The new 11th St has two platforms which are 850 feet long and 35 feet wide. Bernard Goldentyer was the CCCC Project Manager for the City of Philadelphia, making him responsible for coordinating the efforts over a dozen different contracts totaling over $250 million. The key to the project was supporting and underpinning Reading Terminal which is a historic structure and keeping all the utilities, including phone lines, in Center City intact while the project was done. In a nod to Chinatown for tolerating the construction, artisans and Masons were brought in from China to create the Chinatown Arch.

References

External links

{{Crossings navbox , structure = Crossings , place =

Schuylkill River The Schuylkill River ( , ) is a river running northwest to southeast in eastern Pennsylvania. The river was improved by navigations into the Schuylkill Canal, and several of its tributaries drain major parts of Pennsylvania's Coal Region. It fl ...

, bridge = 30th Street-Suburban Station connector , bridge signs = , upstream = Vine Street Expressway Bridge , upstream signs = , downstream = John F. Kennedy Boulevard Bridge , downstream signs = SEPTA stations and terminals Railroad tunnels in Pennsylvania Transportation buildings and structures in Philadelphia Tunnels completed in 1984 Buildings and structures in Philadelphia Underground commuter rail Tunnels in Philadelphia Rail transportation in Philadelphia

Planning and development

See also

References

External links