Throughout this series so far, I have looked at the concept of through-running as applied or envisioned in several different cities: Philadelphia, Toronto and Los Angeles. It was not applied in Boston, because the North-South Rail Link many Bostonians had hoped would be included in the infamous “Big Dig” highway megaproject in the 1980s was never built and might never be. I will now turn to New York City, which receives hordes of railroad passengers from three directions every day on the Long Island Rail Road (LIRR), New Jersey Transit (NJT), and Metro-North, plus some who take Amtrak trains. There are two different concepts of “through-running” under discussion, and I will spend the rest of this series, up until the concluding article, looking at them in detail.
Through-Running for More Than a Century
The concept of running a train into an urban central station on one rail line and out on another is not new. It has been practiced in New York City since the Hell Gate Bridge (originally the New York Connecting Railroad Bridge) over the East River between Queens and the Bronx on today’s Northeast Corridor (NEC) opened for service in 1917. The bridge saw only occasional passenger traffic in its early days, but it provided a means for trains that originated at Boston, Springfield or points north to get to the relatively new Penn Station and then proceed railroad-west from there. Local trains on the New Haven Railroad continued to go to Grand Central Terminal (GCT, also recently opened when the Hell Gate Bridge opened), as did trains from New England points that terminated at New York. GCT was and remains a terminal, with 29 upper-level and 13 lower-level tracks currently in use for boarding and alighting, plus storage tracks. Trains between Boston and Washington, D.C. used the Hell Gate Bridge route through Penn Station as they do today (and at a higher fare as recently as the 1960s). The Pennsylvania and New Haven Railroads were united under the Penn Central flag from 1968 until 1976, when the NEC was transferred to Amtrak. By 1970, Boston trains moved from GCT to Penn Station, and Amtrak no longer serves GCT, leaving it entirely to Metro-North.
In effect, today’s NEC constitutes a through-running route, where trains run from Penn Station, railroad-west through New Jersey and railroad-east through New England. Other trains approach Penn Station from the East on the Long Island Rail Road (LIRR). Today’s proponents of that sort of through-running call for such an operation on the local level, between NJ Transit and the LIRR. Since GCT is a terminal, the proposals now under discussion involve running trains into Penn Station on one line and outbound from there on another. While the PRR and the New Haven proved the concept of that sort of through-running more than a century ago, doing it at the local level is not feasible without changes that would have to be made in the future. We’ll have more to report about that later in this series.
30-Year Discussion
With an exhibit that was on view at several venues in the New York Metropolitan area during 2006 and 2007 titled Making the Connection, advocates touted the idea of connecting the city’s two train stations, Penn Station and GCT, so riders would have access to both. The concept behind the plan was simple in theory, although not so simple to execute. By building a track connection between the two stations, commuters and other passengers entering Midtown Manhattan could have a choice between an East Side destination (GCT) and a West Side destination (Penn Station). Some construction would be needed, but proponents claimed that tunnels going east of Penn Station that the LIRR uses would serve as a start for an eastward buildout, while the original plans for GCT made provision for lead tracks going south toward the Financial District in Lower Manhattan, an extension that was never built.
That plan was considered from the mid-1990s until 2003 as one of the alternatives of a project known as Access to the Region’s Core (ARC). There were three alternatives up for discussion at that time. Alternative G would build the connection between Penn Station and GCT that would enable NJT trains to access the historic station on its lower level. This mirrored an LIRR plan to use GCT’s underground Madison Yard and Lower Level loop tracks. There was a later proposal suggested by advocates to use the station’s Upper Level Loop to take LIRR trains to the high-numbered Upper Level tracks, which were underutilized at the time. The Lower-Level tracks, about 20 feet below the upper-level tracks, are accessed by ramps descending from street level. This is far above the new LIRR Grand Central Madison stub-end terminal located 150 feet down from street level, which has now been in service for slightly more than two years. Alternative P was planned as an eight-track, double-deck, deep-cavern terminal, with twin sets of tracks arranged as 2-over-2. It would be time-consuming to traverse the vertical distance to the existing Penn Station (as it’s also time-consuming to ascend from the LIRR’s “Grand Central Madison” to Metro-North’s historic GCT today), but the new tracks would add capacity on the West Side. The other proposal was Alternative S, two non-revenue tracks designed to enhance throughput for trains deadheading between Sunnyside Yard and Penn Station during peak commuting hours. At the time, it was not anticipated that trains would run between Metro-North suburbs and NJ Transit suburbs, like many SEPTA trains operate in Philadelphia today.
Although the advocates at the time understood that the Major Investment Study (MIS) for the ARC Project included more than 1600 pages of documents, only a brief Summary Report was released (download below). Longtime through-running advocate George Haikalis preserved the report on the website for his advocacy organization, the Institute for Rational Urban Mobility (IRUM).
While the ARC Project was under consideration, outreach conducted by project managers included forming a Regional Citizens Liaison Committee (RCLC) to get feedback from interested and generally knowledgeable people about the project. The Portal Bridge Capacity Enhancement Project (Portal Bridge Project) and the ARC Project each had an RCLC, and I was on both. So were several other advocates from the Lackawanna Coalition, the New Jersey Association of Railroad Passengers (NJ-ARP), and the New York side of the river (personal disclosure: that was several years before I became a reporter on the rail transit beat).
There was no question about what the RCLC members wanted. Our preference was either unanimous or close to it. We wanted Alternative G, mainly because it would provide a new destination for every passenger going to Midtown Manhattan. Metro-North riders would have access to the West Side as well as their historic access to the East Side. At the same time, riders going to Penn Station on NJT or the LIRR would also have new access to the East Side, where there is more office space than on the West Side. There would also be some benefit from capacity enhancement, because the trains going to the station that did not previously serve them would could keep going, rather than terminate on a stub-end track and be required to wait for an available slot so they could begin their next outbound run, whether back out on the line or to a yard like Sunnyside where the trainset would be stored.
In summer 2003, the advocates who favored Alternative G got a rude awakening. The NJT Board was scheduled to meet at Newark’s Penn Station, rather than the agency’s headquarters building across the street. It was a “special meeting” about the ARC Project, and the advocates (this writer included) were all looking forward to the announcement that Alternative G would be selected, that construction of the track connection between the two stations would be starting soon, and that we would someday ride from New Jersey directly to the East Side of Midtown Manhattan.
It was not to be. There was talk that Metro-North was not willing to cooperate on such a project, and one senior manager at NJT was quoted as saying “We don’t have a dancing partner” when asked why Alternative G fell through. The rest, as they say, is history. In essence, Alternative P won the contest, but the project was later downgraded so severely that the opinion of the advocates turned from disliking it to detesting it. Advocates from the original group, including the Lackawanna Coalition and NJ-ARP, became the core of an alliance that included the Rail Users’ Network (RUN), the National Association of Railroad Passengers (NARP, which later changed its name to the Rail Passengers Association, RPA), and state- and regional-level advocacy organizations all over the Eastern half of the country.
As the ARC Project lost its utility and the deep-cavern station became deeper, the advocates continued to fight against it for more than seven years after Alternative G was eliminated from consideration. In 2007, NJT downgraded the project to sever the connection of its proposed new line with the existing Penn Station and move the agency’s trains off the NEC to a separate two-track railroad that would terminate at the proposed deep cavern instead. Advocates complained that the latest downgrade would have killed redundancy both at the New Jersey and New York ends, and without a connection to Amtrak anymore. Both the advocates (who dubbed it “The Tunnel to Macy’s Basement) and Amtrak were furious, and the struggle continued. Over four years, both the Grand Central destination and redundancy were sacrificed, and the only remaining benefit would be more stub-end capacity near Penn Station. Meanwhile, the project’s cost rose dramatically.
The turning point came in 2010. Chris Christie, a Republican, had been elected Governor of New Jersey. A fiscal conservative, he became concerned that the ARC Project, especially with its deep cavern, had become too expensive. Despite strong campaigning from the Obama Administration in support of the project, Christie stood his ground and claimed that New Jersey could not afford its share of the cost. He killed the project that October.
Four months later, Democrats including Sen. Frank Lautenberg (New Jersey) proposed the Gateway Program, which is now well under way thanks in part to the Biden Administration, although it is unclear if the current Administration will attempt to defund it. It calls for the existing Penn Station to function as a stub-end terminal. Another new stub-end terminal, called Penn South, would be added. That component of the program would expand capacity, but it would not enhance mobility, and it would leave some riders further from their connecting subway lines.
Some managers from the old ARC Project are still active and have worked on many other studies and big projects since that time, but they never appointed an RCLC again, despite requests that they do so.
Some of the advocates from the original RCLC are still calling for a connection between Penn Station and GCT that would enable riders to get to both the East and West Sides of Manhattan, rather than settling only for more stub-end tracks in return for the billions of dollars it would cost to build all of Gateway. We will look at these two forms of “through-running” as this series continues.
In the next article, I will examine a proposal for major changes at Penn Station that would not go to the East Side but would institute the former type of through-running. It would also restore the historic station to its former glory, or at least improve its appearance, compared to the way it looks today.
