Biden touts $1T infrastructure law as 150-year-old tunnel faces replacement

By Michael Hernandez

WASHINGTON (AA) - US President Joe Biden touted his signature infrastructure investment law Monday, visiting a 150-year-old tunnel that has long served as a bottleneck for rail traffic near Baltimore, Maryland.

The narrow Baltimore & Potomac Tunnel has long snarled freight and passenger traffic heading south from Baltimore's Penn Station, including trains the president would take from his home state of Delaware to Washington, D.C. while he served as a US senator.

The tunnel is widely credited with being the largest rail bottleneck along the heavily-used Northeast Corridor, which runs from Washington, D.C. to Boston, Massachusetts.

It is now slated to be replaced by a wider tunnel that will be named after Frederick Douglass, an icon who escaped slavery and went on to become a leading activist calling for the abolition of slavery, and a senior statesman. The replacement will be funded in part via Biden's $1 trillion infrastructure law.

"I've been through this tunnel a thousand times, and when folks talk about how badly the Baltimore Tunnel needs an upgrade, you don't need me to tell you. I've been there and you've been there too," said Biden as he addressed a kick-off event for the new tunnel's construction.

"For years, people talked about fixing this tunnel...this is a 150-year-old tunnel. You wonder how the hell this is still standing. With the bipartisan infrastructure law, we're finally getting it done."

The replacement process is expected to create 30,000 jobs, including roughly 20,000 construction jobs, according to the White House.