“It’s too expensive!”

How many times have you heard that complaint, especially when you’re about to buy something no more exciting than a heavy-duty electrical wall socket whose unappreciated life will be spent behind the refrigerator?

That’s what it felt like last week as U.S. Rep. Josh Gottheimer donned a hard hat, orange vest and safety harness to lead similarly attired reporters through a narrow hatch and down an extension ladder some 90 feet to a huge concrete chamber that’s roughly the dimensions of an aircraft carrier.

At first glance, this dimly lit Amtrak site in Manhattan's Hudson Yards section simply amounts to a big, subterranean right-of-way for trains on New York's far west side. But as Gottheimer and Amtrak officials explained, this visit offered an early glimpse at a long-awaited project called Gateway that promises to someday ease rail commutes from New Jersey into nearby Penn Station by adding a second rail tunnel under the Hudson River.

Still, it's just another expensive hole in the ground, right?

“About $235 million,” confirmed a spokesman for Amtrak, the government-sponsored rail-passenger operation.

Ouch! That's the kind of heart-stopping government expense that drives Northeasterners out of the pricey New York-New Jersey region. But for the congressman from New Jersey’s 5th District, this empty chamber is the key to ending the tortuous delays and ugly breakdowns that contribute to the exodus.

“Without this right-of-way,” Gottheimer explained in a voice rising above the hum of generators and fans, “there is no Gateway.”

The clamor to build a second two-track tunnel began more than two decades ago after it became clear that the existing two century-old tracks could no longer provide reliable commutes for all the Amtrak, Long Island Railroad and NJ Transit commuters entering Penn Station. Federal figures show traffic doubled there from 1976 to 2014.

The pressure on New Jersey commuters became most acute after 2000 when the New York City job market expanded dramatically. While the nation's largest city gained 550,000 jobs from 2004 to 2014, the peninsula state to its west lost 37,000 as motor-vehicle traffic across the three Hudson crossings continued to rise.

The key to easing the crush seemed obvious: A second tunnel, called ARC for Access to the Region’s Core, could speed commuting and persuade drivers to leave their cars at home. But by 2009, the nation was reeling from the worst recession since the Great Depression. So in 2010, freshman Gov. Chris Christie withdrew New Jersey's promised funding for its share of the ARC plan. The governor even predicted that ARC's $8.7-billion price tag would rise exponentially.

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Mass transit advocates were furious, and Amtrak found itself in a serious bind.

Losing the additional tunnel would stunt the growth of its Boston-to-Washington, D.C., Northeast Corridor route. So, a second even bigger plan was devised called Gateway, which would include a second, two-track Hudson tunnel and other improvements, such as upgrading the fragile Portal swing bridge over the Hackensack River.

Pegged tentatively at $27 billion, Gateway would even solve a design flaw in the ARC plan. As Christie had noted, ARC left passengers at the nearby Macy’s instead of Penn Station, mainly because the underground path to Penn would have required costly digs to move or avoid infrastructure. The clearest path was through Hudson Yards, an area that included a Long Island Railroad maintenance yard and a huge, planned multibillion-dollar commercial, residential and mixed-use development, also named Hudson Yards.

Amtrak executives had to move quickly and nimbly. The developer, trading as the Related Companies, had expected the ARC to run north of its properties, but Amtrak now wanted the right to run tracks beneath the massive project. It took some negotiating, but Related agreed. Ground for this concrete connector was finally broken in 2014, but construction costs for the first phase would be high: $185 million.

An unexpected silver lining appeared, however, when Superstorm Sandy flooded the existing two Hudson rail tunnels in 2012 — a turn of fate that prompted the Federal Transit Administration to provide the needed funding from its emergency relief account.

Bordered mostly by 10th and 11th avenues and West 30th and West 33rd streets, the roughly 1,000-foot-long cavern may lack the traditional trappings of color, charm or beauty. But viewed from 90 feet below street level, this unnamed, as-yet untracked passageway is nothing short of an engineering marvel.

It amounts to two flood-proof tunnels about 20 feet wide and 35 feet high, each with nine-foot-thick walls mounted on top of slabs of concrete and rock anchored in bedrock. Excavation alone required some 3,000 trucks to cart away more than 70,000 cubic yards of rock and soil.

For now, though, it's little more than an expensive man-made cave whose main function is supporting skyscrapers that will soon rise above. Linking it to Gateway is expected to come later.

Exactly how much later is unclear because Congress hasn't funded what the Obama administration had called the nation's foremost transportation project. Despite President Donald Trump's campaign pledge to spend $1 trillion on infrastructure improvements, his budget slashes Amtrak funding nearly in half and limits its capital funding initiatives only to fully funded projects.

Although the powerful House Appropriations Committee restored Amtrak funding last week for projects like Gateway, its future in the Senate is hardly assured. The House committee is headed by Rep. Rodney Frelinghuysen, R-Harding, but New Jersey's two Democratic senators don't sit on the upper chamber's appropriations committee.

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Gottheimer calls these halting steps "punting."

If touchdowns in this political environment are unlikely, the Bergen Democrat says he can at least climb 90 feet down a shaft to a dark place where generators shine some dim light on a distant possibility forged through old-fashioned persuasion and compromise.

"What we saw here today," he said, "were the actual possibilities — part of the tunnel waiting to go across the river to pick up passengers."

But leveraging a $235-million hole in ground to produce a $27-billion bi-state gateway will likely take more than one or two big scores. Long before Gateway's target date for completion in 2025, at least one of the two current Hudson River tracks is expected to be shut down for months of maintenance.

And before the two new tracks begin carrying additional passengers, Penn Station will need to be upgraded to accommodate them. The Gateway plan calls for expanding across the street at the refurbished Post Office to be renamed Moynihan Train Hall. The tentative price tag: $1.6 billion.

Is all this too expensive?

"All the studies show that when you add substantially to transportation, businesses flourish, people move in, real-estate prices go up and the whole economy improves," Gottheimer said. "But what's happening now in New Jersey is the opposite."

Amtrak estimates that failing to build Gateway will cause enough wage loss for New Jersey commuters to dwarf all construction costs within a few years. Using U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics data, it puts the reductions in jobs and wages at $5 billion to $15 billion a year.

Email: cichowski@northjersey.com