Posted Jun 23, 2022, 9:01 PM
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New Yorker for life
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Join Date: Jul 2001
Location: Borough of Jersey
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https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/23/nyregion/penn-station-tracks-amtrak.amp.html
Overburdened Penn Station Needs More Tracks. But Where Could They Fit?
As debate rages on a plan to renovate the nation’s busiest hub, Amtrak awarded a contract to design a $12 billion expansion that would add train capacity.
By Patrick McGeehan
June 23, 2022
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Amtrak, the national railroad that owns the station and the tracks that run through it, is moving ahead with a plan to expand the station at an estimated cost of $12 billion. That plan envisions demolishing an entire block of Midtown that is home to a 151-year-old church.
On Thursday, Amtrak awarded a contract for the design of the station expansion, which it expects will take two years and as much as $73 million to draw up.
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The Amtrak expansion is part of a comprehensive program of rail infrastructure improvements known as Gateway. The centerpiece of Gateway would be a new pair of one-track tunnels under the Hudson River between Penn Station and New Jersey.
The new tunnels would supplement a parallel pair of tunnels that were built more than 110 years ago and are still damaged by flooding during Hurricane Sandy in 2012. Eventually, Gateway could double the trans-Hudson capacity, with the goal of making the commute into the city more efficient and reliable for riders of New Jersey Transit and Amtrak trains.
But Penn Station’s 21 tracks and platforms were already overloaded before the pandemic. For Gateway to serve its purpose, the station would have to have more tracks. Finding a place to put them in the middle of Manhattan is the challenge Amtrak has handed to a group of companies led by Arup, an engineering and design firm.
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”Already, the station has been operating at a level of intensity far beyond the level that it was designed to support,” said Stephen J. Gardner, the chief executive of Amtrak. He added, “We’re going to double the width of the pipe, but Penn Station, as the bucket that receives the water from the pipe, is already full.”
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Mr. Gardner and Tony Coscia, Amtrak’s chairman, said the designers of the expansion would consider a range of alternatives, including adding tracks to the south of Penn Station, beneath the block of West 30th Street that is the longtime home of St. John the Baptist Roman Catholic Church. “That’s one that Amtrak has long discussed and we believe is feasible,” Mr. Gardner said.
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Coordinating the various pieces of Gateway and plans for Penn Station is complicated by the number of agencies involved. Amtrak owns most of the infrastructure, but the biggest users of Penn Station are the Long Island Rail Road and NJ Transit. The L.I.R.R. plans to start diverting some of its service to Grand Central Terminal later this year; a few years later, another New York commuter service, the Metro-North Railroad, plans to start running some trains to and from Penn.
Amtrak is taking the lead, in partnership with NJ Transit, on planning the expansion. The Metropolitan Transportation Authority, which operates the L.I.R.R. and Metro-North, is overseeing the renovation.
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