One Penn Station solution or albatross?

With maintenance problems causing serious delay and inconvenience to New York City commuters since the first of the year, it has been suggested that Amtrak, a minority user but the sole operator of the facility, give the management of the station over to a single management entity that would not only have sole control of the station but would have sole dispatching authority for passenger trains entering or leaving Manhattan.

As it is perceived by the critics, Amtrak doesn’t give a damn about commuters, as long as the national passenger rail entity can keep its own trains running. It is also noted that maintenance of Penn Station is dependent on Amtrak’s notoriously unpredictable federal funding.

I have touched on this matter in previous blog entries, wherein I noted that an Amtrak failure or bankruptcy or reorganization would likely leave the New York Area commuter agencies financially in the hole for the entire Northeast Corridor, which would include Penn Station.

Whether the perceptions of Amtrak’s motives are true or not, Penn Station is a relic of its times that Amtrak is stuck with. No other station on Manhattan can keep the Northeast Corridor connected without a big detour around New York City. Without Penn Stations century-old tunnels, there are no other rail crossings of the Hudson until Albany. Trains from the south cannot even get to Grand Central, once used by Amtrak for Midwest-bound trains, without that big detour.

Historic decisions haunt the Northeast Corridor (NEC).

Had the Pennsylvania Railroad chosen to build bridges into lower Manhattan, although costly to maintain, they wouldn’t have been subject to storm flooding. Bridges could have been built with excess capacity, now sorely needed, without proportional additional cost to the Pennsylvania. The State of New York was partially responsible for this decision, as, it mandated participation in bridges by New Jersey railroads for the original Pennsylvania Station project, and those railroads were not interested at the time, being perfectly happy with trans-Hudson ferry service.

Had those other railroads participated, it’s possible that the station itself would have had more tracks to accommodate all those additional trains; and it would have been above ground instead of buried below street level.

Had the original station not been demolished in favor of using the air rights for a high-rise and sports arena, it is conceivable that boarding capacity expansion, at least in the station itself, would not be as difficult as it is

Air rights are no longer a good argument for burying station tracks. Northwestern Station in Chicago has a successful high-rise headhouse and office building over air rights to terminal tracks and station platforms that were already twenty feet above street level when the predecessor station was built in 1912. That’s only two years after Pennsylvania Station.

As I was writing this, Penn Station, as it’s now called, was partially closed due to record rains over New York City. One entrance and some platforms had to be closed. Subways in other parts of the city were also flooded. Another argument for a station at or above grade, preferably above.

However, Amtrak is no stranger to big stations below grade. Chicago Union Station, Amtrak’s next busiest, is effectively built at or below the level of the Chicago River. It will never have zero chance of flooding, even with completion of Chicago’s extensive network of storm water control.

So how much money would it take to strangle the albatross and put New York’s station above grade? More than Amtrak will ever see, if Congress has anything to say about it. But let’s not let big numbers scare us into being illogical. Big numbers are already on Amtrak’s plate.

The NEC Commission has recently identified no less than $38 billion of so-called state of good repair needs, and another $28 billion in infrastructure improvements and capacity enhancements. Two new tunnels under the Hudson, to supplement the two already in use (but over 100 years old), would cost about $28 billion.

Above ground instead of tunnels? It is generally reported that railroad bridges cost about $10,000 per linear foot per track, but double or triple that to clear navigable waterways. Including approaches, a bridge that replaced the current approximately 4.5 linear (9 track) miles of tunnels Jersey to Long Island would include approximately 20 track miles of bridges, not including a new station proper. Including both the Hudson and East rivers, about half of that would have to clear navigable water. I get to about $1.6 billion, a reasonable figure, and certainly one achievable within the normal range of projected infrastructure improvements.

The illogical part is land acquisition. Manhattan is an expensive place, and I estimate that land or air rights in Manhattan would have to be purchased for roughly $2 million a square foot. You could probably get four tracks into a hundred foot right of way, which would mean about $2.6 trillion for land. Whoa! Stop there! Even with eminent domain, and without a huge private investor, the land costs alone would scuttle this project before the first environmental impact statement could be issued.

So then, two tunnels are comparatively cheap, and there’s no land acquisition involved. Expanding the underground stations doesn’t look nearly as daunting. Would the whole benefit from unified management? Undoubtedly.

Looks like Amtrak, and NEC commuters, will be stuck feeding the albatross. And maybe looking for that multi-trillion dollar investor.

©2017 – C. A. Turek – mistertrains@gmail.com

(Charles A. Turek is a writer and novelist based in Albuquerque, NM. After four decades working in areas of the insurance industry related to transportation, he now writes on all aspects of American railroading. Charles is a political conservative but believes in public funding of passenger rail as a part of the federal government’s constitutionally conservative obligation to provide for defense and public infrastructure so that private enterprise may flourish.)