Grace Industries was contracted by the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) New York City Transit (NYCT) to perform work to clear and clean its subway track drainage infrastructure at several locations. Grace performed this work under the limits of nightly weekday track and station outages, with teams working continuously on the weekends. This project addresses a neglected aspect of this crucial New York infrastructure, which had not previously been maintained.

The scope includes manual and high capacity vacuum removal of debris and litter from drainage basins and pipes, and high-pressure water jetting of clogged pipes. Due to track access constraints between stations, innovative solutions were developed by the Grace team to more effectively perform the work. Under extremely tight restrictions on length and height, our team built a customized rail vacuum system with a 20 cubic yard, multi-entry interceptor that could be mounted on work trains. Because of the efficiency of the custom equipment and the Grace project management team, the NYCT authorized construction of a second rail-mounted setup to increase the productivity.