On the Howard Street Tunnel partial reconstruction project in Baltimore for railroad company CSX Corp., Skanska project manager Michael Goetz found a way forward to deliver the project safely while cutting two years off the original timeline, even finishing a month ahead of the updated schedule. In addition to helping convince the owner that the team could save time and money with a short-term full tunnel closure instead of working through weekend and overnight closures, Goetz led the Skanska-Fay JV team in continually improving means and methods to shorten response times for many repeatable and replicable tasks.
“Michael’s passion for heavy construction, along with his technical expertise, was key to the successful expansion of the Howard Street Tunnel in downtown Baltimore,” says Gary Almeraris, Skanska’s vice president of operations. “He motivated his design and construction management team and more than 200 craft through a ’24-hour cannonball operation,’ which resolved unknown conditions and kept the course of rebuilding this tunnel at the highest quality.”
The project involved lowering the invert of the 130-year-old tunnel by about 2 feet to allow double-stack container cars to pass through, providing a key freight link between the Port of Baltimore and points in the Northeast.
Goetz and the team developed a plan to work through the mined, cut and covered and concrete box sections of the tunnel by replacing the previously inverted with a series of 1,188 segments of prefabricated inverted slab. Each 6-foot-long segment had a flat bottom and wings that rose to meet the tunnel walls. With the shutdown, crews in 12-hour shifts worked in cycles of three segments at a time, dewatering and demolishing with equipment that will operate inside the constrictive tunnel and using a custom rail car equipped with a 120-foot gantry and a 30-foot cantilever to fly the precast segments and track panels into place.
Process improvements developed throughout the project allowed the team to increase their rate from two cycles to three per day. For example, because they needed the concrete to cure to at least 1,000 psi to restore the inverted arch and transfer the loads from the footers, the team was able to save time by adding shoring posts to instantly transfer the load, allowing crews to move on to the next cycle immediately instead of having to wait.
“My goal is to lead by being approachable, establishing clear and simple processes, and trusting my team to perform at a high level,” says Goetz.
Work was initially scheduled to be completed by the end of 2027. Instead, the project reached substantial completion and the tunnel reopened to trains last fall.
“Mike Goetz’s leadership and technical expertise were instrumental in driving the Howard Street Tunnel project to completion safely and ahead of schedule,” Brandon Knapp, senior director of construction Mid-Atlantic at CSX, said via email. “His ability to coordinate complex logistics ensured that this transformative project was successfully delivered.”
Goetz joined Skanska in 2008 and has worked as a field engineer, superintendent, project engineer and project manager on a variety of infrastructure projects related to the redevelopment of the World Trade Center site and the expansion of the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center in New York City, as well as the rehabilitation of maintenance facilities for the Amtrak high-speed rail project and the Portal North Bridge in New Jersey. He now works on the Long Bridge North project in Washington, DC “I am grateful to have worked with outstanding leaders at Skanska and to have benefited greatly from their mentorship,” says Goetz.
