Amtrak’s very expensive expansion plan for Penn Station

When When construction begins this year on the $16 billion Gateway Tunnel, the number of tracks running under the Hudson River between Manhattan and New Jersey will double. That would double the number of trains passing through—but Amtrak says Penn Station can’t accommodate any more trains. That means that if nothing is done, the new tracks will be little more than a billion-dollar redundancy when the project is completed in 2038. The railroad has tried to dodge the question for years, but now that the tunnel is finally funded this summer, Amtrak has a plan it wants to sell us.

This is a bombshell: Three blocks in Midtown are to be partially or completely demolished to build a massive expansion of Penn Station just south of the current complex, potentially costing $16.7 billion. This proposal is perhaps the most expensive evidence of the cold war between Penn’s three transit agencies, which Instead of working together to make the best of the current situation, they are pushing for an outcome where everyone gets what they want. Amtrak would stay in Moynihan Train Hall, NJ Transit would handle the expansion, while the MTA would be left largely to its own devices in the old Penn Station. There is no other plan Amtrak is taking seriously, and it is one the railroad has been dreaming of since 2011. That is not how planning is supposed to work. Federal regulations require Amtrak to consider a full range of options and solicit feedback from the community. On Aug. 5, it dispatched Petra Messick, a senior planning manager, and consultant Foster Nichols to assure the civic-minded crowd gathered by the Regional Plan Association and the Municipal Arts Society that this was the case.

Messick and Nichols, who work for design and construction giant WSP, did not elaborate on the expansion plan. They did not reveal that the expansion is inflated in size and price, according to Amtrak’s own unpublished 200-plus-page feasibility report. That document shows the station could have up to 12 tracks and cost $16.7 billion (almost as much as the Gateway Tunnel). That’s twice the size of the six-track station that New Jersey wanted to build under Macy’s in Herald Square in the 2000s (the “Access to the Region’s Core” project) before then-Governor Chris Christie killed it, citing budget overruns. When I read the news of the report in the New Yorker post last year it sparked a new wave of popular opposition to the enlargement 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, however, was evaluate 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 terminus — “run-through” in engineering jargon. An NJ Transit train heading up the Northeast Corridor, for example, would run past Penn Station instead of stopping there, perhaps turning around in Hempstead on Long Island, where the MTA’s Long Island Rail Road already has a terminus. And it wouldn’t just be more convenient for rail operators; passengers would also be able to streamline their trips. New Yorkers could take the MTA to Newark Airport without having to transfer to NJ Transit, and the same goes for New Jerseyans going to JFK, who could take NJ Transit to Jamaica and then simply transfer to the AirTrain.

“My job was not to get rid of it,” Nichols told the audience of the through alternatives. “My mission was to make it work.” Then he set about getting rid of both. To understand his arguments against through rail, you have to understand how Penn Station works. At the north end, there are tracks dedicated to the Long Island Rail Road, which serve the West Side Rail Yards, over which Hudson Yards was built. At the south end, there are dead-end tracks for New Jersey Transit. In the middle are the tracks that showcase the engineering genius of the Pennsylvania Railroad: A century ago, planners connected the Hudson and East River tunnels here so that passenger trains of all kinds could easily travel through Manhattan to their next destination—as through rail. These tracks are shared by all three railroads. But instead of using them as planned, NJ Transit, LIRR, and Amtrak often run trains back and forth on this section, complicating things.

Penn Station as it stands would need some renovation to accommodate more trains through the transit. Messick and Nichols discussed two proposals. One, from ReThink Studio, a nonprofit group of activists and planners, is absolutist and calls for redesigning the entire station so that each track can connect to both tunnels. This would reportedly cost about $10 billion (though that’s pretty optimistic). That Amtrak dismissed the proposal as unworkable was not surprising. What was surprising was that Nichols focused much more on it than on the more practical proposal from the Tri-State Transportation Campaign, another nonprofit advocacy and policy group. According to sources, it essentially stitches together various proposals developed internally at the MTA and NJ Transit to improve the existing Penn Station. The part of the Tri-State plan coming from the MTA focuses on widening the platforms in the station’s center core, which are already designed for through-trains — this would allow passengers to board and alight more quickly. The plan also calls for building a new platform and two new tracks for NJ Transit just south of Penn Station. The part of the plan provided by NJ Transit shows that the new tracks would require some demolition of the street above (as would the widening), but the project is designed to preserve as much of the block as possible. The estimated cost to Tri-State, based on MTA and NJ Transit documents, would be less than $7 billion. That’s $10 billion less than the widening plan, money that could be used for the long list of other Amtrak needs, like upgrading overhead wires so commuting on a hot day isn’t a gamble.

Nichols is well versed in the Tri-State region’s numbers. He was the lead author of the shelved MTA report on the midpoint redesign of Penn Station. But in his presentation, he changed the proposal: He removed a track and sent all the trains the new tunnels could carry only to the southern terminus, rather than dispersing them. These changes reduced the plan’s effectiveness, but were slipped into the presentation rather than clearly communicated to the audience. The result, Nichols said, was that the Tri-State plan removed 13 trains from the required 48 per hour. (When asked, Nichols and Amtrak argued that the changes were made to improve the Tri-State plan’s viability.)

In their argument, Messick and Nichols also argued that either transit plan would require NJ Transit to raise the platforms of its older stations so that passengers could board and alight trains comfortably, an investment the MTA made in its commuter rails decades ago. They also pointed out that the east and west sides of the Hudson use different power systems (but did not mention that this problem has been solved elsewhere or that one reason these different systems exist is that Amtrak has not modernized its power grid). “Those may be good ideas,” Nichols said. “But to essentially hold the completion of the Gateway program hostage? That’s a really risky decision. You risk the trains not being able to run once Gateway is up and running.” A railroad source familiar with the presentation said: “They put a gun to everyone’s head and said we can’t run a single train unless we get another $16 billion to build this project. They are the hostage takers.”

Through traffic works. Amtrak passes through Penn Station dozens of times a day as trains run through between Washington, DC, and Boston. What makes Penn Station unique is that it was designed to do this. European railroads have often had to spend billions to build new tunnels, like the Elizabeth Line in London, to connect their operations. Another line in London, the Thameslink, connected two rail networks in the 1980s on a shoestring budget of just £4 million by re-opening an unused tunnel. Here in New York, we’re lucky. The really hard work is already done. We just choose not to use it.

It’s clear that Amtrak isn’t remotely interested in making the most of the massive station it already has. This madness continues because the people who could tell everyone to stop and figure out how to share – namely U.S. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, New York Gov. Kathy Hochul and New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy – have shown little interest in stepping in. They should. The three of them 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 really necessary and how big it needs to be. They should order the publication of the results. And they should commit to implementing the recommendations. We cannot let the new Gateway tunnels go unused, but neither can we spend billions more to satisfy the territorial demands of the rail companies while important transport needs remain unmet. This traffic-stricken region needs all the services it can get.