When major construction on the $16 billion Gateway Tunnel gets underway this year, it will eventually double the number of tracks running under the Hudson River between Manhattan and New Jersey. That would, in turn, double the number of trains coming through — except Amtrak says Penn Station can’t fit any more trains. This means when the project is finished in 2038, the new tracks will be little more than a multibillion-dollar redundancy unless something is done. The railroad tried to dodge this question for years, but now that the tunnel is finally funded as of this summer, Amtrak has a plan it wants to sell us.
It’s a doozy: demolish part or all of three blocks in midtown to build a giant expansion of Penn Station immediately to the south of the current complex, at a potential cost of $16.7 billion. This proposal is perhaps the most expensive evidence of the cold war among the three transit entities at Penn, which, instead of cooperating to make the most out of the current station, are pushing for an outcome that would effectively give each one their own. Amtrak would stay in Moynihan Train Hall, NJ Transit would take the expansion, while the MTA would be largely left to itself in the old Penn Station. There is no other plan that Amtrak is taking seriously, and it’s one the railroad has been dreaming of since 2011. This is not how planning is supposed to work. Federal rules require that Amtrak consider a whole host of options and seek feedback from the community. On August 5, it dispatched Petra Messick, a top planning executive, and consultant Foster Nichols to assure the civically minded folks gathered by the Regional Plan Association and the Municipal Arts Society that this was the case.
Messick and Nichols, who works for design and construction giant WSP, didn’t detail the expansion plan. They didn’t disclose it has ballooned in size and price tag, according to Amtrak’s own unreleased 200-plus-page feasibility report. That document shows the station could have as many as 12 tracks and cost $16.7 billion (nearly the equivalent of the Gateway Tunnel). That’s double the size of the six-track station that New Jersey proposed building beneath the Herald Square Macy’s in the 2000s (the Access to the Region’s Core project) before then-governor Chris Christie killed it, citing budget overruns. When I broke the news of the report in the New York Post last year, it fueled a new wave of community opposition to the expansion proposal, which led to renewed interest in the possible alternatives. And that, indirectly, led to the Regional Plan/MAS coffee klatch.
What Messick and Nichols did do is put on a performance of evaluating two of the most prominent counterproposals to the expansion plan. Both are variations on the same idea: running more trains through Penn Station instead of treating it as a terminal stop — “through-running” in engineering parlance. For example, a NJ Transit train running up the Northeast Corridor would continue past Penn Station, instead of stopping there, and turn around at, perhaps, Hempstead, in Long Island, where the MTA’s Long Island Rail Road already has a terminal. And it wouldn’t just make things more convenient for train operators; riders could streamline their travel. New Yorkers would be able to take the MTA to Newark Airport without making a transfer to NJ Transit, and ditto for New Jerseyans heading to JFK, who could take NJ Transit all the way to Jamaica for an easy transfer to the AirTrain.
“The task I was given was not to kill them,” Nichols told the audience about the through-running alternatives. “My mission was to make it work.” He then proceeded to kill both. To understand his arguments against through-running, it’s important to clarify how Penn Station works. On the northern end, there are tracks dedicated to the Long Island Rail Road that feed the West Side Rail Yards over which Hudson Yards was built. On the southern end, there are dead-end tracks for New Jersey Transit. In the middle are the tracks that exhibit the Pennsylvania Railroad’s engineering genius, where a century ago planners linked together the Hudson River and East River tunnels so passenger trains of all types could easily run through Manhattan to their next destination — through-running. These tracks are shared by the three railroads. However, instead of using them as designed, NJ Transit, the LIRR, and Amtrak often reverse trains in and out in this section, gumming up the works.
Penn Station, as it is organized now, would still need some work to accommodate more trains via through-running, and there are two proposals for how this could look that Messick and Nichols discussed. One, from ReThink Studio, a nonprofit group of activists and planners, is absolutist and calls for reworking the entire station so every track can connect to both tunnels, which it claims would cost approximately $10 billion (though that’s pretty optimistic). That Amtrak dismissed it as unworkable was unsurprising. What was surprising was that Nichols spent much more time focused on it than on the more practical proposal from the Tri-State Transportation Campaign, another nonprofit advocacy and policy group. Sources say that it basically staples together different proposals developed internally at the MTA and NJ Transit to improve the existing Penn Station. The part of the Tri-State plan that comes from the MTA focuses on widening the platforms in the middle core of the station already designed for through-running — this would allow passengers to board and disembark more quickly. The plan would also construct a new platform and two new tracks for NJ Transit to Penn Station’s immediate south. The NJ Transit–sourced part of the plan shows the new tracks would require some demolition on the street above (like the expansion), but the project is designed to preserve as much of the block as possible. The estimated Tri-State price tag, based on the MTA and NJ Transit documents, would be less than $7 billion. That’s $10 billion less than the expansion plan, money that could go to the laundry list of other Amtrak needs , like upgrading its overhead power wires so commuting on a hot day isn’t a spin of the roulette wheel.
Nichols is more than familiar with the Tri-State numbers. He was the lead author of the shelved MTA report on reworking Penn Station’s middle. But in his presentation, he altered the proposal: removing a track while sending all of the trains the new tunnels could carry to just the southern end station instead of spreading them around. These changes reduced the plan’s effectiveness but were slipped into the presentation instead of clearly disclosed to the audience. The result, Nichols said, was that the Tri-State plan fell 13 trains short of the required 48 per hour. (In response to questions, Nichols and Amtrak argued the changes were made to improve the viability of the Tri-State plan.)
In making their case, Messick and Nichols also argued that both through-running plans would require NJ Transit to raise the platforms of its older stations to allow for riders to easily walk on and off trains, an investment the MTA made in its commuter railroads decades ago. They also pointed out there are different power systems used on the east and west sides of the Hudson (but didn’t mention this issue has been solved elsewhere or that one reason those different systems exist is Amtrak’s failure to upgrade its power grid). “Those may be good ideas,” Nichols said. “But, to essentially hold completion of the Gateway program hostage? That decision-making is really risky. What you’re risking is not being able to run the trains once Gateway is up and running.” As one railroad source familiar with the presentation said, “They have pointed a gun at everyone’s head and said you won’t be able to run one more train unless you give us another $16 billion to build this thing. They’re the hostage takers.”
Through-running works. Amtrak does it through Penn Station dozens of times a day as trains pass through it running between Washington, D.C., and Boston. What makes Penn Station unique is that it was designed for it. European railroads have often had to spend billions constructing new tunnels, like the Elizabeth line in London, to link together their operations. Another line in London, the Thameslink, connected two rail networks together in the 1980s on a shoestring budget of just £4 million by putting an unused tunnel back to work. Here, in New York, we’re lucky. The really hard work is already done. We just opt to not use it.
It’s clear that Amtrak is not even remotely interested in making the most out of the giant train station it already has. This lunacy persists because the people with the power to tell everyone to knock it off and figure out how to share — namely U.S. Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg, New York governor Kathy Hochul, and New Jersey governor Phil Murphy — have shown little interest in intervening. They should. The three should find someone with a track record of independence and success at a major transit agency to lead a six-month review and get to the bottom of whether the Penn expansion is actually necessary and just how big it needs to be. They should mandate that the findings be released to the public. And they should commit to adopting its recommendations. We can’t let the new Gateway tunnels go to waste, but neither can we spend billions more simply to satisfy the territorial urges of the railroad companies while major transit needs go unaddressed. This traffic-choked region needs all the service it can get.
