Amtrak Starts New Public Comment Era on Penn Station with Potential Trump Wild Card

The furious debate over how to increase service into—and possibly through—Penn Station will enter a new and far more public phase this year with the railroads saying that all the alternatives are still on the table, including two ideas they have previously said won’t work.

The railroads said they were considering six alternatives, including a new idea for expanding Penn Station to the east toward Herald Square as well as the two ideas to stay within the station’s present footprint, which a consultant had said won’t work.

At stake is everything from the fate of several adjacent city blocks to the ability of the railroads to accommodate the rising tide of commuters into Manhattan, particularly from New Jersey.

The central challenge is the desire of the railroads to double the capacity of the station, to 48 trains an hour at peak periods, which will be possible in the next decade after the new Gateway tunnels under the Hudson are completed

The railroads that use Penn Station—Amtrak, which owns it, and New Jersey Transit and Long Island Railroad, its largest users—shared two major bits of news with their Station Working Advisory Group at the most recent meeting.

The first is that they will this year open the formal environmental review of a station expansion. This review will include community presentations of plans and public hearings.

Related, the railroads told the advisory group, the Federal Railroad Administration will take a lead role in the planning for the expansion. The FRA is an agency of the U.S. Department of Transportation, and the FRA’s entry into the process thus creates a direct line for involvement by the Trump administration.

Unlike congestion pricing, which Trump opposes and has said he would like to reverse, the President has not taken a position on the future of Penn Station, one of the city’s largest real estate development challenges. Governor Hochul has said Trump told her he would like to see a “beautiful” Penn Station, although the “passenger experience,” as the railroads call it, is only one piece of a complicated engineering and railroad-operations challenge.

“I talked about Penn Station,” Hochul said last November in describing a call with the then newly elected President Trump. “I said from Day One I want Penn Station to be something we can be proud of. I said it can be beautiful. He agreed. He agreed that these are important priorities and pledged to work with me on those.”

The MTA, which runs the Long Island Railroad, has in fact retreated in recent weeks from plans for a major rebuilding of the Penn Station train hall, partly so that whatever renovation does take place would be exempted from the upcoming environmental review and partly because it says it underestimated the costs of essential upgrades for back-of-house elements like ventilation and air conditioning.

It wants to proceed with those while the review of expansion plans is underway.

Amtrak, which has been leading the expansion discussion, presented six separate alternatives to its advisory group, including two that had previously been analyzed by its consultant and found to fall short.

Those two were to build a lower level under Penn Station or to reconfigure platforms and operations to run more trains through the station. This second option, so-called through-running, has been widely promoted by advocates who say it is an alternative to physically expanding the station, which could involve tearing down adjacent blocks.

In recent weeks three separate advocacy groups have criticized the railroads for, in their view, not adequately considering through- running and failing to demonstrate that expanding beyond the footprint of the current station would actually allow the increase in service the railroads say they want.

Two of these groups, the City Club and ReThinkNewYork, held forums, separately, with speakers arguing that other major world cities, including London and Paris, had rebuilt their regional transit systems to better connect communities on opposite sides of the central hub by running trains through the central city.

The third group, the Effective Transit Alliance, specifically analyzed and rejected the consultant’s report that the railroads had presented to their Station Working Advisory Group last year.

“In a recent study,” the Transit Alliance wrote, “Amtrak has claimed that through-running is impossible in the current Penn Station footprint, and that the region instead needs to spend $16.7 billion to demolish a block of Midtown Manhattan and build Penn Expansion. . . . ETA’s analysis, based on an examination of best practices from peer cities across the globe, shows that Penn Station can handle the ridership that [the new] Gateway [tunnels] will bring if the region simply changes the way it operates its trains.”

Tom Wright, President of the Regional Plan Association and co-chair of the Penn Station advisory group, said the railroads were listening to the critics.

“Over the summer, they were looking at just some of the options, through-running or kind of anything that didn’t change the footprint of [Penn Station]—and they concluded that those didn’t work. And then folks came at them and said, ‘You haven’t shown that other options work yet now either.’

“What they’ve done is they’ve taken that criticism to heart and said, ‘Okay, we are going to keep putting everything on the table at the same time, so that there’s an apple-to-apple comparison as we develop these other concepts.’ I think that’s the right way to go about doing this.”

A leading opponent of expanding the station to the south, Eugene Sinigalliano, said he was encouraged by the railroads’ action.

“In past meetings, we were told that the railroads were moving on to just study some type of expansion to reach their capacity goal of 48 trains an hour, and that they are really kind of done looking at through-running in the station itself,” said Sinigalliano, who is a member of the advisory group and president of the tenants association at 250 W. 30th St., a building directly in the path of a southern expansion. “So what was weird is that through-running in the station without expansion is back on as one of the draft preliminary alternatives to be analyzed. Which kind of is contradictory to what they said.”

Railroad officials stressed that they had not changed their judgment. Indeed, in the power-point presenting the six options to the station advisory group, the slides for the two that would be contained within the station’s present footprint—through-running and a lower level—carried an asterisk and a footnote to the consultant’s report that found they would not work.

Tom Wright said the involvement of the Federal Railroad Administration was a good thing and as much technical as political. The required environmental review by the federal government would be of the plan as presented by the FRA.

So the FRA needs to be involved in the process of winnowing the six options described by the railroads to whatever plan will ultimately be presented for environmental review.

“They’re doing this in an intellectually honest way and a transparent way,” Wright said.

In addition to the two options within the present footprint of the station, the railroads presented these four other options:

Northern Expansion

This was reminiscent of a plan, sometimes called Macy’s Basement, which was killed by then New Jersey Governor Governor Chris Christie because he didn’t want to pay New Jersey’s share. This new version would run tracks from the new Gateway tunnels under 34th Street to either a single or bi-level station between 33rd and 34th streets. This would create better connections to Herald Square and its Sixth Avenue subway trains, but less connectivity to the existing station.

Eastern Expansion

This was the newest concept. “That was never presented to any of us before,” said Sinigalliano. Officials said this idea grew out of the examination of building a lower level to Penn Station. Instead of additional platforms under the present station, the railroads would run tracks under the present station but build platforms east of Seventh Avenue running all the way past Sixth Avenue, creating better connection to the Sixth Avenue subway and PATH lines but less connection to the present station. A portion of the land above ground was recently cleared when Vornado Realty Trust tore down the Pennsylvania Hotel. That lot is presently vacant, although Vornado says it wants to build an office tower there.

Southern Expansion

Generally thought of as the railroad’s preferred plan, it is also perhaps the most controversial because it would involve demolishing the so-called block 780 to the south of the current station. The draft alternatives included six variations of a southern expansion, some of which seemed designed to reduce demolition above. This approach would “offer convenient connectivity to existing station,” the railroads said. “It doesn’t matter if they are tearing down two complete city blocks of New York,” said Sinigalliano, “That doesn’t hurt them. It may hurt a lot of other people and businesses and residents and employees. But it doesn’t hurt them.”

Hybrid

A blend of a more limited expansion to the south and reconfiguration of the existing station to accommodate more trains via through- running. This idea was based on concepts from an advocacy group, the Tri-State Transportation Campaign.

“In collaboration with our partners NJ Transit and MTA on the Penn Station Capacity Expansion Project, we are advancing a multi-step evaluation of preliminary alternatives to increase Penn Station’s rail capacity,” an Amtrak spokesman said. “The alternatives will be analyzed on their ability to meet the transportation needs of the region and the goals of the Gateway Program, among other criteria to be formally developed with the Federal Railroad Administration (FRA) and in response to public input as part of the environmental review process. We are grateful for the feedback received from [Station Working Advisory Group] members, and look forward to advancing this important project.”