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Earlier this week, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) announced that it had completed tunnel boring for all three of MTA's "megaprojects," including the East Side Access project.

Since the fall of 2007, a fleet of seven, 200-ton tunnel boring machines have been operating underneath MTA mainlines. They've dug 13 miles of new tunnels through the "mica-inflected granite schist" that anchors midtown Manhattan's skyscrapers, and through the "boulder-strewn soft ground" in Long Island City, Queens, as MTA officials put it in a prepared statement. Now, the "grinding, shrieking roar" no longer reverberates through the earth beneath the city.

"Sixteen brand-new, concrete-lined tunnels now exist under New York City where none did five years ago," said MTA Chairman Joseph Lhota.

But many megaproject components still need to be completed. Workers on all three of the projects will continue to excavate station caverns; build platforms, stairways, mezzanines, elevators and escalators; lay tracks and third rail; install electrical and signal systems, and communications equipment; and more, said Michael Horodniceanu, president of MTA Capital Construction.