Gov. Hochul on Tuesday saved a Manhattan neighborhood and firmly put the state on the right track to fix Penn Station in rejecting Amtrak’s nightmare that would have needlessly ripped up a huge chunk of Midtown, plowing under homes and businesses and costing at least $17 billion. Way to go, Guv!
Equally great, the next day, the imperious CEO of Amtrak, Steve Gardner, a huge impediment to many of New York’s projects, like Penn access from the Bronx, was fired at the direction of the White House, leaving the stumbling railroad leaderless.
This is the moment for New York to take control of the future of Penn Station, a pitiful depot that has been mismanaged for more than half a century under Amtrak and also to turn Amtrak’s Gateway boondoggle into something that’s actually useful, saving years of time and billions of dollars.
For nine years, this column has been railing against Amtrak’s foolish and wasteful Gateway plan to seize the area due south of Penn, Block 780, bounded by 31st and 30th Sts. and Seventh to Eighth Aves., for a sub-end terminal for NJTransit trains. We welcome Hochul coming to the same conclusion.
Here is the entirety of what she said when asked what common ground she has with President Trump, especially on transit:
“We are doing Penn Station. I’m supposed to show him the plans; that will be my next trip down. I’m excited about that. We have $1.2 billion committed. I said about $6 billion from the federal government would be enormously helpful. A little wince there, but I won’t take that as a no.
“This is where having the president be a New Yorker, someone who understands how critical the infrastructures are to functions of our city was good.
“The challenge has been that Amtrak had a different vision. I want to redo the station. I want it to be magnificent. And if you go to the station there are major parts that have been redone already. They really have. It’s beautiful. But there’s parts that are still behind. I want to bring in the natural light, we have a great plan. I get updates literally every week on our progress because I’m impatient.
“But we had to get everybody really heading down the same tracks here and that was hard because Amtrak was rather insistent that it be this larger 780 Block. And I said, ‘I’m not going to destroy this neighborhood.’ We can do the station itself. Make it something that we are proud of without having to destroy a neighborhood in the process. Because I don’t think the demand is there for office that was once there.
“And I’m not going to destroy a neighborhood in the process. I had to shift a narrative and a focus that was headed down one way, pull them back and say ‘this is how we are going to do it.’ So I’m excited about this.”
We are excited, too. When Hochul returns to the White House with her plans, she should bring photos of Grand Central, which New York has controlled for decades and done a magnificent job of restoring to its full splendor to compare with sorry Penn, which is Amtrak’s responsibility. We suggest pictures of Penn’s ridiculously designed multilevel NJT concourse crowded during the p.m. rush and the derelict Hilton Passageway, lined with Amtrak’s storage rooms.
She should also show Trump the tremendous improvements that New York has achieved in those parts of Penn where it has sway, like Moynihan Train Hall in the Farley Post Office and the beautifully revamped LIRR concourse along 33rd St.
Contributing to Gardner’s ouster from his high paying CEO post (topping a $1 million with salary and bonuses) Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy is furious with Amtrak over the awful conditions at Washington’s Union Station. We’d be happy to guide Duffy around Amtrak’s horror show at Penn.
Underneath Duffy, Trump’s new leaders nominated for the Federal Railroad Administration (railway man David Fink) and Federal Transit Administration (former Hudson Valley Rep. Marc Molinaro) once confirmed should empower the states that have suffered under Amtrak’s suzerainty. And they can start with New York.
There are four different plans for Penn Station, from the MTA, the firm of ASTM, and the nonprofits groups ReThinkNYC and Grand Penn Community Alliance. The common thread is that all of them remove the upper level, bringing passengers closer to the platforms (for faster boarding and alighting) and creating much higher ceilings. Imagine LIRR’s spacious 33rd St. concourse extended all the way to the other end of Penn at 31st St.
At the track level, to allow for 12-car lengths and to make Moynihan accessible to all of Penn, the shorter Tracks 1-4 used by NJT must be extended west. NJT has refused, believing that they were departing to Block 780. No more. Also, the different fiefdoms within Penn for each railroad have to be abolished, creating a single, unified station.
Achieving this has been impossible because Amtrak, with only 5% of the trains and passengers at Penn, dictates what happens in the station. And Amtrak is incapable and inept. That has to end and Trump should force the now-decapitated Amtrak to get out of the way and let New York be in charge. The same for the four tubes under the East River that are used by the LIRR. Hand their ownership over the MTA. That goes as well for the two tubes under the Hudson, which could also go to NJT or the Port Authority.
The MTA can then use its proven overnight and weekend repair work to fully refurbish the East River and Hudson tubes damaged by Superstorm Sandy. Amtrak is planning to stupidly close tubes for years on end, unnecessarily hurting rail travel all the way to Albany.
As for intercity trains which Amtrak runs so badly, bring in some competition; Elon Musk has suggested privatization.
Without Block 780, Amtrak’s Gateway, which is aiming its two new Hudson tubes towards 780, has to be altered. The alignment of the new rails in New Jersey, now separate and parallel to the south of the existing Northeast Corridor, have to instead straddle the NEC, allowing the doubling of the number of trains coming into Penn from the west. Hochul should get the bistate Gateway Development Commission to make the change.
Where can those additional trains go? Through-running trains to Queens and Long Island or Grand Central (a far better option) could do it, but the easiest way is to just adopt a simple concept offered by the private operator AmeriStarRail that would require zero construction of tracks or platforms.
AmeriStarRail would require that all Amtrak trains dwell for only 2 minutes in Penn, like they do in other NEC stations. They would pull in, release passengers and take on new ones and leave immediately. When shown, NJT and LIRR liked the plan, but said Amtrak would never agree. Well, Trump and Duffy can now make Amtrak agree.
