Railway Giants Finally Unveil Why They Need to Expand Penn Station

Demand for rail service into Penn Station is growing quickly again, post-covid, and the three big railroads told a community forum they will need to expand the station in the next decade or so to accommodate the increase.

The bulk of the growth is coming from New Jersey, said officials of Amtrak and NJ Transit, but the MTA said it concurs with the need for expansion and has plans of its own for more trains as Metro North joins the Long Island Railroad in serving Penn Station.

The officials spoke at a forum organized to address claims by community and advocacy groups that the railroads needlessly plan to tear down the block south of Penn Station, often referred to by its tax roll designation, Block 780, to expand the station. That block contains bars, a strip club, a Catholic Church, a big parking garage, a deli, and fast food and pizza outlets, among other businesses.

These advocates have been arguing that the destructive expansion can be avoided if the railroads will reorganize their operations, so commuter trains travel through Penn Station, rather than drop all their passengers there, as they do know.

The railroads said there was a germ of a good idea in through-running, for the future, but that it would not solve the need to meet growing demand in the near-term.

Speaking at the forum held at NYU, Petra Messick, a senior Amtrack official, stressed that no decision had been made to demolish Block 780, and that the railroads were looking at expansion alternatives both north and south of the current station. Whatever plan the railroads adopt will be subjected to an environmental review that will include public hearings, she said.

“Trans-Hudson train service into Penn Station needs to be doubled, at least, to meet the existing and future needs of the region,” Said Messick. “All through-running or hybrid configurations within the footprint of the existing station fall short of this goal.”

Amtrak ridership is already exceeding pre-pandemic levels and New Jersey Transit does so on midweek days when office use is highest, she said.

Doubling service under the Hudson will become possible in the 2030’s, Messick noted, when construction is completed on what is known as the Gateway project, a rebuilding of the rail line between Newark and Penn Station New York that includes two new tracks under the Hudson River to supplement the two tracks built under the river in 1910 by the now defunct Pennsylvania Railroad.

Gateway, which is under way, will allow more trains, but the question bedeviling both the railroads and political leadership is where to put all those new trains in the already overcrowded Penn Station.

To bolster her argument that an expansion will be needed, Messick presented a well-known transportation consultant, Foster Nichols of the firm WSP, who said he had analyzed two proposals from advocacy groups, ReThink NYC and TriState Trnsportation, to overhaul railroad operations as an alternative to expanding the station.

“Implementing through-running will be time consuming, costly and disruptive,” Nichols said, thus risking “the timely development of urgently needed station capacity.”

He said, for example, that it would be possible to reconfigure tracks and widen platforms within the present footprint of the station, but the price would be ten years of service disruptions as bad as the one summer when New Jersey Transit had to divert more than a quarter of its trains to Hoboken.

That, said Jeremy Colangelo, New Jersey Transit’s chief planner, is not something the railroad every wanted to experience again.

Nichols did open the door to a more integrated regional rail service in the future. He said it might well make sense to create an almost subway like service that connects the city and the inner suburbs, what he called regional metro. But this is unlikely to be “cost-effective” for less frequent service to more outlying suburban areas also served by New Jersey Transit, LIRR and MetroNorth.

So what would be needed is actually three levels of service, Amtrak’s intercity trains, commuter trains to outer suburbs and a metro rail service to inner suburbs, Nichols said.

In any case, Nichols said, this would require substantial investment and a level of strategic thinking and coordination that is not currently the responsibility of any one agency.

The railroads spoke at a forum organized by the Regional Plan Association and the Muniicpal Arts Society, which have for some time been encouraging consultations between the railroads and advocates for the neighborhoods and the station.

“Gateway is the highest infrastructure priority in the entire region–and even in the nation,” said Tom Wright, President of the RPA. “New York City exists because it has access to a large, diverse and talented workforce that includes residents of the five boroughs and also over ten million residents of the wider region.”

Over a million suburbanites hold jobs in New York City, Wright noted, and nearly half, 450,000 live in New Jersey. He said that even under conservative projections–incorporating more working from home and slower growth rates–transit ridership across the Hudson will be 15 percent to 32 percent higher by 2050.

The Gateway project is due for completion, including the repair of the old tunnels, by the late 2030’s

“So a priority for RPA is making sure we fully utilize the new Hudson River tunnels and are building a system that can continue to grow and connect the region for future generations,” Wright said. “This includes better connections between suburban communities AND creating more capacity for travel to and from the core.”

The co-sponsor of the event, Elizabeth Goldstein, president of the Municipal Art Society, noted that expanded capacity was only one part of the needed conversations about Penn Station, the busiest and arguably the worst rail hub in North America.

“Both our organizations have been partners in this work for decades,” Goldstein said. “Then, as now, we were seeking to raise the level of possibility for Penn Station from its current state to one that does the region and city proud. We already know what this looks like, a station like Grand Central that is user focused, efficient and a station that lifts you up, rather than is a drag on your spirit.”

While Amtrak, which owns Penn Station, has been leading the railroads on the questions of capacity and expansion, The MTA is leading a separate process to improve the train hall above the tracks.

The rebuilding of Penn Station is one of the most complex development projects in the city’s history. For a long time, the future of the station was tied to a major redevelopment of the neighborhood that called for the construction of ten new office towers and an apartment building.

But with the office market in flux, and the principal property owner slow walking new construction, Governor Hochul “decoupled” Penn Station from this larger development plan.

One of the principal advocates for improving Penn Station without tearing down adjacent blocks, Samuel Turvey, said he was unconvinced by the presentation from the Railroads.

“Consulting firms like WSP, whatever their competencies, answer to their contracting parties. Here that is the railroads that have opposed through running for years, mostly because they do not want to integrate operations,” said Turvey, head of ReThink NYC, which drew up one of the proposals reviewed by Foster Nichols, the Amtrak consultant.

When completed the Gateway project will double peak capacity under the river from 24 to 48 trains per hour and the railroads say they will need an expanded Penn Station to accommodate all of this, but have not yet presented a specific expansion plan for this.

“Of critical importance,” said Turvey, “they are criticizing through running plans for not achieving 48 Trains Per Hour while also making clear that, after all these years, the Railroads still don’t have a plan that can get to 48 Trains Per Hour.

“They are playing a blend of Poker and Russian Roulette with the fate of a neighborhood and the vitality of this region. These questions and analysis need to be escalated above the Railroads—it is critically important that the public interest is fairly represented in all these studies which has not happened to date.”