AirTrain

Cost: $1.2 billion

Development Team

The AirTrain to John F. Kennedy International Airport is by far the largest construction project completed in the New York Metropolitan area in 2002.

Weighing in at $1.2 billion, the Port Authority of New York & New Jersey's AirTrain cost almost three times more than anything else finished last year. Designed to address the chronic difficulty of getting to and from the region's airports, AirTrain is an 8.1-mile light-rail system that links JFK's nine airline terminals to each other and the airport as a whole to mass transit stations in Howard Beach and Jamaica, Queens.

Construction began in 1998 and was essentially done by the end of 2002. The guideway (track) and track equipment were 100 percent complete. The light-rail vehicles were ready and waiting, the service and inspection shop, control center and storage yard were 100 percent finished, as was the tunnel under the taxiways and the relocated service road. The reconstructions of the Howard Beach and Jamaica stations, which will link AirTrain to other train and bus lines, were 86 percent complete.

The 3.3-mile line west from JFK to Howard Beach includes stops at airport car rental facilities and the employee/long-term parking lot before moving on to the Howard Beach subway station where travelers can connect to New York City Transit's A Train.

A second 3-mile line north to Jamaica runs for much of the way along the median of the Van Wyck Expressway. Building the guideway along the Van Wyck meant reconfiguring the highway from the airport to Atlantic Avenue while allowing for the continued flow of traffic, a process that began in summer 2000.

At Jamaica, AirTrain connects to the Long Island Rail Road, which has had a station there since 1913, to NYCT's E, J and Z subway lines and to a dozen different bus routes.

At its height of construction activity, the project employed 2,500 workers. "It was a daunting task because of the sheer size of the project," said Gary Winsper, project manager for AirTrain Transit Consortium, which functioned as the DBOM contractor.

He added that the PA did not have the rights to construct the guideway off of airport grounds when the project began. So the PA was busy buying land and securing right-of-ways as the consortium continued to build.

"We provided the PA with a lot of help in this regard," said Winsper, who is also an executive vice president with Slattery Skanska Inc. "We created designs and plans to demonstrate to communities where we wanted to build that it could be done without disrupting their quality of life."

Due to the death of a worker last year during a test run of the train, the beginning of service has been delayed. As of April, testing had been resumed, at a slower pace and with more precautions in place.

Winsper was confident, however, that AirTrain would be serving the public by the end of 2003.