Railroad Construction Company, Inc. came in low at $149,565,941 to build a new water conveyance system for the Tibbetts Brook daylighting project in the Bronx — an open channel stream, a closed conduit, and a greenway, according to NYC DEP's PACT bid-results listing. Three other firms bid the job: Triumph Construction Corp, CAC Industries, and Posillico Civil.

Daylighting is exactly what it sounds like — pulling a buried waterway back into open air instead of letting it run through a pipe underground. Tibbetts Brook has spent decades stuffed into the city's combined sewer system, and every storm that overwhelms that system sends brook water and sewage together into the Harlem River. Giving the brook its own open channel again is meant to take that volume out of the sewer for good.

A four-bidder field on a job this size — nearly $150 million — is a healthy number for civil work of this complexity. It's not simple excavation; it's stream channel construction, a closed conduit section, and a greenway built on top, which means bidders had to price geotechnical risk, utility relocations, and public parkland work all in the same number. That Railroad Construction's number and the next three firms' numbers were all willing to chase this one says the scope was buildable enough to attract serious civil contractors rather than scare them off.

For the losing bidders, this is a reminder that DEP has more green infrastructure and combined-sewer-overflow work coming behind projects like this one — Triumph, CAC, and Posillico all have the résumé for the next one, whichever agency lets it. For subs and suppliers, a project like this means years of work: channel lining, greenway landscaping, drainage structures, and public access improvements once the civil shell is built.

The listing on DEP's PACT results page names Railroad Construction as low bidder; award has not been confirmed as final in the record supplied, so treat this as the apparent low pending DEP's formal award action.