This morning, Amtrak, NJTransit and the MTA will be making a public presentation at NYU “about possibilities for expanding regional rail capacity at New York Penn Station” says the Regional Plan Association and the Municipal Art Society.
These two nonprofit groups, RPA and MAS, once provided independent analysis about the use of public space and infrastructure, but of late have just seemingly following Amtrak’s lead on everything and everything that Amtrak has done related to Penn and its larger $50 billion Gateway boondoggle has been wrong or lies or both.
We will see what today brings.
The invitation for this morning’s session says that, “the railroads will present new analysis regarding possibilities for expanding regional rail capacity at the station, including converting the station to an all through-running operation, followed by a panel discussion and a Q&A with the audience.”
This column has carefully followed Gateway and the future of Penn for eight years and this is our 134th editorial on the subject since 2016. But the issue goes back two decades before then, to the Access to the Region’s Core project, a partnership of NJT, MTA and the Port Authority. Amtrak was not part of the effort.
The original ARC tunnel was to have two new tubes from New Jersey come under the Hudson River into Penn Station and then wisely continue to either Grand Central Terminal or to Queens and Long Island, both examples of through-running.
But Metro-North didn’t want NJT in Grand Central. That was a terrible mistake, repeated Metro-North’s blocking the Long Island Road Road’s East Side Access, forcing the wasting of an additional $10 billion and 10 years to construct an unneeded new station deep under Grand Central.
ARC, refused entry to GCT, changed its alignment from a true doubling of the Northeast Corridor, with a new track each to the north and the south, straddling the existing NEC rails, to a much less efficient separate, parallel railroad. Instead of going to Penn and then GCT, ARC was stupidly altered to go to a stub-end terminal under Macy’s basement.
When that awful, modified ARC plan died, Amtrak’s Gateway picked it up, only swapping the stub-end terminal to the north of actual Penn (Macy’s basement) with a stub-end terminal to the south of actual Penn, called Penn South on Block 780, which is when we first starting complaining, in 2016. And that has always been Amtrak’s goal, plowing under a big swath of Midtown, now estimated to cost $17 billion. Unless they say different this morning.
The smart move? Revert to the initial ARC alignment, straddling the NEC and bringing the trains into Penn (not 780) and out the other side to GCT or Long Island.
A few years ago, we warned someone just starting working on this mess to beware of Amtrak, because everything they say is a lie. Lies such as it being impossible to repair the two Hudson tubes and two East River tubes in place nights and weekends. Of course it is possible, as the MTA did with the L-train and as everyone else around the world does. Or the lie that the old 1910 tunnel and the new Gateway tunnel need the expensive and antiquated technology of bench walls. Or the lie that 780 is the only way to increase capacity under the Hudson.
