Squeezing New Trains Out Of NYP’s Footprint

Phase One: Eight More AM Slots And Six More PM Slots

As a baseball nut, I can’t resist a baseball metaphor now and then. Just as a slugger-less baseball team can “manufacture” runs by stealing bases or sacrificing runners, the Federal Railroad Administration yesterday released the first phase of a study into tweaks to manufacture some additional train slots at an overburdened New York Penn Station groaning from demand that far outstrips capacity.

Today’s Penn Station sees more than 1,000 train movements every day, and at its peak NYP can handle 24 trains per hour. But demand is already much stronger than that, and once the Gateway project is finished, the combined tunnels will deliver 48 trains every hour into the Penn Station complex. In fact, some studies suggest that even 48 won’t be enough, instead projecting total demand for as many as 52 hourly trains.

We all outgrew Penn Station decades ago, and the problem is about to become exponentially worse.

FRA has been looking hard at what can be done, sometimes looking at what can happen quickly and with minimal disruption and sometimes looking further over the horizon at what might be done later. Wednesday’s press release from the U.S. Dept. of Transportation reporting preliminary findings of the Penn Station Service Optimization Study -- which catchily results in “Penn Station SOS” (we saw what you did there!) -- describes “basic infrastructure improvements to New York Penn Station’s existing footprint [which] could unlock additional train capacity and improve the passenger experience.”

Image: Penn Transformation Partners

This means straightforward things like extending three key platforms, installing more stairs and escalators, getting obstacles and junk off the existing platforms, and using more and better signs to solve one of the key causes of boarding and detraining delays -- befuddled passengers unsure where to go next.

DOT says doing these things would boost capacity to 32 trains per hour during morning peak and 30 in the evening peak, a respectable eight hourly trains in the morning and six in the evening.

“The SOS will help us achieve four of our key objectives of the Penn Transformation project: to exponentially increase the concourse capacity, make the station fully accessible, enable for safer and more efficient station operation, and to accommodate current and future passenger growth,” Amtrak Special Advisor Andy Byford says in the press release. “When we say we’re going to bring a world-class station to New Yorkers, it’s not just about design and layout, it’s also about what the SOS will ultimately accomplish through this essential, independent, and data-driven analysis. I look forward to working with DOT, FRA and our partner railroads on phase 2 of the report and identify ways to further increase the capacity of Penn Station to meet its future needs.”

Unhelpfully, while DOT’s press release says we can “Click HERE to read more about the study and its findings,” there’s no actual link. So, I can only go on what the release says that the study says without reading it myself. [EDIT: A friend at FRA has directed me to all the study links. The Penn Station SOS Executive Summary is here; the SOS Phase I report itself is here; and a Penn Station SOS Phase I Addendum can be found here.]

Even so, along with getting shovels into the ground in 2027 on the Penn Station improvements travelers throughout the Northeast have waited decades to see, this seems to be another gift from “Train Daddy” (Byford’s NY-applied nickname: read here) to the rail-riding public, and we welcome any and all steps to untangle this mess.

Later today I’ll be sitting down with my colleagues on the Penn Station Transformation working group in an Amtrak conference room above the Moynihan Train Hall, where presumably we’ll learn more from Andy and others about how the SOS improvements will unfold.

I told all of you back in May that I was happy to see that they were able to come up with a way to increase NYP’s capacity for trains per hour without physically enlarging the existing station complex beyond the streets it now touches: 31st street to the south and 33rd street to the north, as well as Ninth Ave. to the west and Seventh Ave. to the east.

And I’ll underscore again today that when our working group got our first brief in the Fall of 2024, we were told there was no way to increase the number of hourly trains without physically enlarging Penn’s footprint. At that same meeting, we were also told to wait about a decade before we might expect to see anything happen.

I’m well aware of the rising temperatures around this project. The most recent manifestation was Rep. Jerry Nadler’s op-ed in the New York Times calling for more transparency on costs and how this effort will be paid for...and by whom. Those are legitimate questions, and they deserve detailed and thoughtful answers. But one reason why Penn Station has been so bad for so long with so little progress is because there’s always something, so we’re in an endless search for the perfect at the expense of the good enough.

Every previous vision tended to create a constituency large enough to stop it. Move the Garden? The Garden fights. Expand south? The neighborhood fights. Build a replica of the old station? Budget hawks fight. Build a purely functional transportation facility? Preservationists fight.

At some point somebody has to produce a plan that enough people dislike only moderately. Byford and the project team, in my view, have done precisely that. It’s not perfect, and clearly there’s more to come. By all means let’s be sure all the details are right and the funding is understood. But for Pete’s sake (and the sake of the 600,000 passengers slogging through NYP every single day), let’s stop arguing and actually get on with it!