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HISTORY This Week
The HISTORY® Channel | Back Pocket Studios
4.5 • 4.2K Ratings
🗓️ 12 February 2026
⏱️ 2 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
HISTORY This Week will return with new episodes this Monday, February 16th, with a story about the most vital train tunnels in the United States.
The North River Tunnels—their formal name—connect New Jersey to Penn Station in New York City, carrying 200,000 passengers every day. These tunnels underneath the Hudson are now over 115 years old, and are in desperate need of repair.
The tunnel rehabilitation effort will be the largest infrastructure project in the country. It’s just getting underway, but now, the funding has been tied up in a political battle between the Trump Administration, Amtrak, and the states of New York and New Jersey.
The stakes could not be higher. If these tunnels were to fail, up to 20% of U.S. GDP could be at risk.
In this episode, we will unpack just how difficult it was to dig these tunnels in the first place. One man, Pennsylvania Railroad President Alexander Cassatt, was determined to build this critical rail connection, ultimately linking the entire Eastern Seaboard via train for the first time, using engineering methods that had never been tried before.
If he failed, his corporation—the largest in the world at the time—would have been doomed.
🎧 Stay tuned this Monday, February 16th, for the full story.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | The Premier League is exciting. |
| 0:04.0 | It's exhilarating. |
| 0:07.0 | And sometimes it's... |
| 0:11.0 | So when you need something to help you ride the highest and loads of all that action, |
| 0:17.0 | grab a Coke to keep you in the game. |
| 0:20.0 | Time to refresh. Time for a Coke. Coca-Cola, |
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| 1:00.0 | That's goaddy.com slash aI-R-O. |
| 1:01.9 | History this week. |
| 1:04.5 | February 1905. |
| 1:10.9 | A quiet morning at the rail yard until the ground gives way. |
| 1:16.0 | An entire locomotive is swallowed whole. |
| 1:22.7 | It is another setback for an audacious project to tunnel under the Hudson River. |
| 1:27.4 | The world's largest corporation is determined to succeed. |
| 1:35.7 | And today, 115 years later, these tunnels are a national emergency waiting to happen. |
| 1:42.7 | History this week will return with new episodes February 16th, starting with the moment you just heard, |
| 1:45.1 | the story behind the most important train tunnels in the United States. And we have plenty of brand new stories on deck for weeks to come. |
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