ENR 2025 Top 25 Newsmakers
Michael Goetz: Led Joint-Venture Team to Deliver Critical Rail Tunnel Rebuild in Baltimore Two Years Ahead of Schedule
The partial rebuild of the Howard Street Tunnel in Baltimore was completed two years ahead of the original schedule.
Related Article:
Skanska-Fay Team Cuts Two Years Off Baltimore CSX Tunnel Reconstruction Schedule
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On the project to partially reconstruct the Howard Street Tunnel in Baltimore for railroad company CSX Corp., Skanska Project Manager Michael Goetz found the way forward to deliver the project safely while cutting two years off the original timeline, even finishing a month early on the updated schedule. In addition to helping convince the owner the team could save time and money with a short-term full shutdown of the tunnel rather than working during weekend and overnight closures, Goetz led the Skanska-Fay JV team in continually improving means and methods to shorten turnaround times for many repetitive and replicable tasks.
“Michael’s passion for heavy construction, coupled with his technical expertise, was key to the successful enlargement of the Howard Street Tunnel under central Baltimore,” says Gary Almeraris, vice president of operations at Skanska. “He motivated his design-build management team and the 200-plus craft through a ‘cannonball 24/7 operation’ that solved unknown conditions and stayed the course of rebuilding this tunnel to the highest quality.”
The project involved lowering the 130-year-old tunnel’s invert by about 2 ft, in order to allow double-stacked 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 tunnel’s mined, cut-and-cover and concrete box sections by replacing the former invert with a series of 1,188 precast invert slab segments. Each 6-ft-long segment had a flat bottom and wings coming up to meet the tunnel walls. With the full shutdown, crews on 12-hour shifts worked in cycles of three segments at a time, de-watering and demolishing ahead with equipment that would work within the constrictive tunnel and using a custom rail car equipped with a 120-ft gantry and a 30-ft cantilever to fly the precast segments and track panels into place.
Improvements to the process developed over the course of the project allowed the team to increase its rate from two cycles to three per day. For example, because they needed concrete to be cured to at least 1,000 psi to reestablish the inverted arch and transfer the footers’ loads, the team was able to save time by adding shoring posts to instantaneously transfer the load, allowing crews to continue to the next cycle immediately instead of having to wait.
“I aim to lead by being accessible, establishing clear and simple processes, and trusting my team to perform at a high level,” Goetz says.
Work was originally scheduled to complete in late 2027. Instead, the project reached substantial completion, and the tunnel reopened to trains last fall.
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“Mike Goetz’s leadership and technical expertise were pivotal in driving the Howard Street Tunnel Project to completion safely and ahead of schedule,” Brandon Knapp, senior director of Mid-Atlantic construction at CSX, said via email. “His ability to coordinate complex logistics ensured this transformative project was delivered successfully.”
Goetz joined Skanska in 2008, and he has worked as a field engineer, superintendent, project engineer and project manager on a variety of infrastructure projects related to the World Trade Center site redevelopment and the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center expansion in New York City, as well as the rehabilitation of Amtrak’s high-speed rail maintenance facilities and the Portal North Bridge project in New Jersey. He is now working on the Long Bridge North Project in Washington, D.C. “I am grateful to have worked under outstanding leaders at Skanska and have benefitted greatly from their mentorship,” Goetz says.
