For more than a year, not a single 2 or 3 train has run on weekends between Manhattan and Brooklyn.
"It's made me very angry," said one commuter.
Only work trains have passed through what's known as the Clark Street Tube, forcing riders on both sides of the tunnel to reconsider their weekend travels.
"You have to think about things differently," said one commuter. "You have to think about, if you take this train, where you'll end up and how much longer it's going to take."
But not for much longer. On June 24, crews are set to wrap up 56 weekends of Sandy-related repairs inside a tunnel that spans more than a mile through the East River.
"It seems like a long time, but we're finally here," said Sharda Persaud, engineer with MTA New York City Transit.
NY1 on Saturday got an exclusive look at the work going on inside the tunnel, which is among eight MTA subway tubes that flooded during the 2012 hurricane.
The Clark Street tunnel was closed for six days after the storm after it took on more than 500,000 gallons of saltwater.
"Electrical work, when they have saltwater, of course, over time, they're going to get corroded and you're going to lose service with them. So we needed to change them," Persaud said.
Crews did mechanical, electrical and structural work, putting in new power cables, more than 60,000 feet of fiber-optic cable and four new pump rooms.
To protect against future storms, some of the new equipment has been raised from previous height levels inside the tunnel.
"If we do have another Sandy, it shouldn't affect service as much as this one did," Persaud said.
Crews also put in new sections of track in sections of the tunnel where concrete had to be replaced.
"And have the train back up and running within 53 hours," Persaud said.
Now, the MTA gets set to move on to a massive tunnel repair job, one which will close the L line's East River tunnel for 15 months starting next April.
The Sandy repairs that are limited to weekends are not done yet. Once this project is completed, the weekend-only tunnel work will be shifting over to the F line and the tunnel that runs between Brooklyn and Manhatan, though the MTA hasn't set a date for when that one will begin.