The Metropolitan Transportation Authority started construction this week on a $1.9 billion resignaling and track replacement project covering the A and C subway lines through Brooklyn and Queens, according to amNY and Railway Supply, which both cite the agency's own announcement.
The job swaps out communications-based train control hardware supplied by Siemens for signal systems that, in some stretches, date to the system's original construction. amNY reports the work will touch roughly 750,000 daily riders across the two lines once finished, and Railway Supply confirms the Siemens CBTC package as the core of the contract.
This is the same program the publisher covered last week when Governor Hochul announced it as the MTA's largest-ever signal project — what's new now is that the work itself is underway, not just funded and announced. The project sits on a corridor that already carries a flagged maintenance problem: the MTA's own Inspector General this month found compromised roofs, with vegetation growing through them, at Bronx repair shops that service this same rolling stock fleet.
Signal modernization jobs like this one typically spin off years of follow-on contracts — communications rooms, power upgrades, station-adjacent civil work, and the inevitable change orders when crews find conditions in 80-year-old tunnel sections that don't match the drawings. None of that is out to bid yet, but the agency's current-opportunities page is where it will land first.
For now the prime contract is Siemens' to execute. The MTA has not detailed a subcontracting plan publicly, and this piece makes no claim about one.