Conflict About the FRA Study on Penn Station
The Federal Railroad Administration just released phase 1 of its own study on Penn Station capacity. Assuming that the Gateway tunnel is built but no other improvements to the station are made, the FRA thinks that the station’s infrastructure can handle a peak traffic of 32 trains per hour entering from New Jersey in the morning and 30 returning in the afternoon if part of the station is used for through-running. The assumptions on dwell times and other operational matters are conservative, and will be explored more deeply in a phase 2 report.
I bring this up because ETA has a report giving more nuance on the FRA report, welcoming it and yet demanding that phase 2 take operational reforms more seriously. We believe, with further reforms to reduce peak dwell times within the current footprint of Penn Station, that much higher throughput than 32 trains per hour is possible, potentially the 48 that the North River Tunnels and Gateway tunnels are capable of. On the other hand, Streetsblog is much more negative about the report. Dave Colon calls it a ruse, saying it exists to give a veneer of technical respectability to a Trump project that is not about transportation but about the appearance of building something as a signature.
On the technical matters, I naturally think ETA is right here; the report would not be published if I had serious misgivings about it. But Dave is right on the politics. The purpose of the FRA report has to be understood in this political context. It’s not about trying to snipe the possibility of Penn Expansion, because there’s no expectation that there should be any money for Penn Expansion; the expansion is expected to cost $16 billion on top of $7 billion for Penn Reconstruction, a project almost as useless as Penn Expansion, and this only gets funded in the context of an omnibus federal spending bill, which isn’t forthcoming. A spending bill with money for this may materialize if the Democrats win in 2028, but that depends on the economic conditions of 2029, and also there is little chance FRA activity in 2026 is conducted with an eye to a spending bill that may be negotiated in 2029.
Nor is the report exactly about how to do through-running. Phase 1, at least, does not give a blueprint for how to integrate operations at the station or for what near-term infrastructure and rolling stock investments are required to facilitate it. The word “Hunter” does not appear once in the report. Neither does the word “Shell.” Grade-separating these two junctions is the most important physical infrastructure required to support modernization of commuter rail operations in New York. It’s not exactly through-running infrastructure because it equally improves operations regardless of whether any through-running is implemented, but these are both high-priority projects budgeted in the hundreds of millions, and New Jersey Transit already asked for money for Hunter made available in the Biden-era Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and probably would have gotten it if Kamala Harris had won the election. That these projects are not mentioned tells me this isn’t a report about how to integrate infrastructure with operations better.
Rather, the FRA report has to be understood in the context of the signature project Trump is trying to foist on Penn Station. As there is no need for Penn Reconstruction (let alone Expansion) from the point of view of passenger throughput, the project is free to send a political message, untethered from any transportation reality. Because there is no transportation value nor any intent to effect any, the cost can be whatever can be afforded. The point isn’t to improve facilities, but to make a statement. Indeed, the more useful part of the report, the future phase 2, is not expected to be released until after station reconstruction begins, the exact opposite of what if the purpose of the report were to inform infrastructure spending.
Authoritarian and backsliding leaders love talking about their infrastructure projects, to the point that there’s sometimes a meme in punditry that they’re better at infrastructure than democracies. In non-populist, depersonalized democratic regimes, infrastructure isn’t used for political polarization purposes, so it’s not attributed to anyone; it’s much easier to identify a piece of infrastructure build by a Hitler or a Mussolini than by any postwar Christian Democratic government, even though the latter did far more than the former, because Hitler and Nazi sympathizers bragged about the Autobahn in ways the succession of democratic leaders since 1949 have not.
In truth, the most successful infrastructure programs are built by an empowered civil service. It can happen in an autocracy if it is sufficiently bureaucratized, as China is and as Russia was until recently. It can’t happen when one leader makes everything about himself; the designs will change too much and reward corruption rather than long-range planning. Among the lowest-construction costs countries, the only one not fully democratic is Turkey, and in Turkey the context of EIB financing for opposition-run cities permits the same kind of bureaucratized infrastructure planning even in a system of competitive authoritarianism. The ideal train station is one that one can’t ever attribute to a single leader; it would be preposterous to identify Berlin Hauptbahnhof as a project of Angela Merkel, Gerhard Schröder, Helmut Kohl, or any of the Berlin mayors during its construction.
In this sense, a national leader taking personal control of the project is best analogized to starchitecture. If a subway line or a train station or a similar rail megaproject has an internationally renowned architect in charge, it costs too much and is unlikely to be functional. Similarly, if it is the identifiable project of a politician, then failure is almost guaranteed, according to any criterion of transportation utility.
Pedestrian Observations 
I don’t think hunter would be one of the top two priorities. To start it seems obvious that Portal South has to be the number 1 issue. Then you probably add to that completing four tracks between Newark and swift interlocking for capacity. Shell seems like an obvious 3rd priority but hunter’s utility seems to directly rely on how many direct raritan valley line trains you think you’ll need in an hour. But it seems possible that other network issues on the LIRR or metro north or even in New Jersey could possibly be a bigger deal. Tough to know until someone does a phase ii analysis!
Excellent and informative post. Thanks. Yet I found myself unsettled by this statement: “In truth, the most successful infrastructure programs are built by an empowered civil service.” We keep learning there is no such capability in the US at the federal or state level.
Therefore it doesn’t matter to me IF Kamala would have sent money here or there. The money would have been burned in the blast furnace you’ve discussed in your past posts studies, litigation, bureaucracy, consultants, competing interests and good intentions. Democrats lead the charge here. This is a system of their design and it needs to be cleaned up.
Conversely, I’m no fan of “authoritarian” management either especially if it has suboptimal results (your post was informative). Yet I do support politicians that spend their capital to bring taxpayers the outcomes expected. Andrew Cuomo’s press for renovations of LGA and Moynihan were wins financially and delivered mostly on schedule. East Side Access not so much.
I was willing to give Trump Duffy and Byford a wait and see. It sounds like we have reasons to worry. Keep up the fight.
LGA and Moynihan would have been completed regardless of his so-called influence. There is, and was, no reason to support Cuomo, a repugnant waste of oxygen whose laundry list of offenses is not worth a further waste of electrons, and who, failing the prison sentence he richly deserves, has mercifully faded into obscurity.
A keyboard warrior appears to say something irrelevant to the topic. What a surprise!
JS’ comment can’t possibly pass for debate. It’s the best we can expect from a generation of soft headed coddled leftists and their social media inspired dorm room politics.
Cuomo had many failings. Infrastructure wasn’t one of them. You are 100% incorrect about LGA and Moynihan. To claim these projects were inevitable ignores decades of actual failure: both sat in bureaucratic gridlock for generations until Cuomo used aggressive, top-down executive force to smash through the inertia, align warring agencies, leverage private capital, and force non-negotiable deadlines that turned decaying national embarrassments into reality.
The MTA, the City and State of NY are structurally bankrupt. It takes real leadership to marshall Federal and private resources. Even if your DSA candidates could punch their way out of a paper bag, no-one serious is going to give them the time of day.
NYC and NY state is slipping into a coma.
You can have moderates who aren’t as dodgy as fuck.
I don’t htink anyone can credibly say Cuomo was a help to the cause of good planning of infrastructure. He rushed things through if it was politically advantageous to him, that’s the opposite of good process.
On the other hand, I’m no fan of Hochul in general, but IBX is a big credit to her. It’s the right project to prioritise, and the MTA eventually settled on a decent alignment (after some pressure from lobby groups, but at least they were responsive to the criticism of their original plan). Sure construction costs are still massively inflated, but that’s a much more systemic issue.
You’ll get no argument from me there. I don’t think Cuomo was interested in planning. I think he was interested in building.
Loathe him or love him, It’s an undeniable fact that Cuomo’s fingerprints are all over LaGuardia Moynihan Eastside Access and the JFK renovation. And if you track the history of the Gateway Project you d find his heavy influence there too
IBX is a terrible project. Hurricane Sandy generated enough traffic – debris going out, construction materials coming in – that things gridlocked. Add a few hundred thousand more people to the outer boroughs and a few hundred thousand more to the rest of the Island you need to move bulk goods in by train and the garbage, sludge and recyclables out by rail. On the same right of way clueless railfans drool over. Or build another deck on the George Washington Bridge, double deck the Cross Bronx and Long Island Expressways.
Yes, IBX is a valuable project. I disagree withadirondacker12800. As being designed, IBX will not interfere with rail freight on the Bay Ridge Branch. The tracks will be separate. The limitations on large volumes of LI rail freight reaching Bay Ridge and vice versa are on the LIRR main line and at the Fresh Pond junction, not the Bay Ridge Branch, whose ROW would be shared with the IBX. Plus, the proposed Cross Harbor Freight Tunnel would never pay its own way. An improvement in freight to and from LI would be to give New York & Atlantic the NYNJ Rail’s Cross Harbor car float operation. Increased amounts of bulk goods could go in by carfloat and the garbage, sludge and recyclables out by carfloat, up to the limits of the other LIRR trackage. The investment necessary for increased capacity would be justifiable.
Although the MTA C&D is not the ideal, civil service construction operation, it has improved. We should recognize the pressure the MTA has been under to maintain the old way of doing things (or doing nothing at significant cost).
It’s not three cars a day. It’s whole train loads. Per hour. Ya can’t do that with car floats. And you can’t run frequent service and freight on the same tracks. Railfans have to make choice. Eating or taking the IBX. I suspect most of them would pick “eating”.
@adiron is single track not enough for freight?
How much freight do the 8 million people, soon to be 9 million people, on Long Island generate? How about the people in New England?
No matter how hard railfans hallcinate you can’t run frequent passenger service and lots of freight on the same tracks. Because here on Planet Earth two trains can’t be in the same place at the same time.
The IBX and freight will have two tracks each on the Bay Ridge Branch right-of-way, so that is not an issue.
The LI freight bottlenecks are the single track sharp curve connecting the Bay Ridge Branch with the LIRR main line at Fresh Pond and the volume of passenger traffic on the LIRR main line. The other restrictions on freight are the costs of handling by multiple railroads from LI to Class 1 railroads in NJ: NY&A<–>NYNJR<–>Conrail<–>CSX or NS.
I’m not in the mood to spend an afternoon waiting patiently for NY City tax maps to load. Google maps disagrees.
Things will change. Those problems get solved or the Long Island Expressway needs to be double decked all the way out to the New Jersey Turnpike
I think we definitely do have to squeeze out awful politicians like Cuomo. Like people don’t have to be whiter than white, but certainly we don’t want people dodgier than Starmer.
At this stage, the questions are:
Whose furnace is going to be fed ? How does the $7 to 8 billion Penn Transformation compare with projects at stations also used or designed for about 100 million annual trips ? Halmar’s Penn Transformation, a cosmetic exercise in comparison with Berlin Hbf construction, will cost four times as much. Built from scratch with separate levels for international and Hispanic gauges, Barcelona’s La Sagrera is expected to cost about $1 billion.
Who is going to pay ? In 2023 Halmar suggested a similar transformation of NY Penn and expected charging NY Penn’s owner Amtrak a $250 million annual rent during 50 years.
The medium-size projects on the list were in some cases good. The Delco Lead that got funded is kind of meh, but the other two main NJT priorities, Hunter and the Mid-Line Loop, are good and would help stabilize NEC schedules. For projects like that, the cost problem is more about bad scope – for example, Metro-North just announced a $1.6 billion speed-up project from 70 mph to 90 mph, which can be done more or less tomorrow on more or less no money, because of unneeded scope like widening the distance between the tracks (in fact tracks at that distance routinely run 100 mph trains or even more here) or rebuilding overpasses over roads that already have enough clearance for trucks.
Volumes could be written about “weaponizing design requirements”.
It’s basically the biggest and best go-to (after “Buy American”) of the scumbag consultants and bid-rigging contract-skimming do-nothing insider agency lifers. Make nearly everything impossible, and make any tiny remaining astronomically expensive = PROFIT!
They pull “standards” (in furlongs and kips and degrees of curvature) directly out of their rectums, then decree that everything remotely normal to be “infeasible” because it “fails to meet the engineering design specifications [handed down on tablets by God]”.
Death truly is too kind a fate for any of those involved.
On “Buy America”: we’re poking around bus procurement costs, and the American cost premium even for routine, almost commoditized buses is very visible, due to the Buy America duopoly.
I so wish Hochul had the foresight to buy imports without federal funds, and instead of bullshitting about Real Red-Blooded Male American Jobs went to the docks when the first bus or train was delivered and did a press conference praising the quality of imported goods.
Alon, what’s worst is that the “Buy American” bullshit props up a couple of Potemkin “manufacturing” companies that astroturf a few dozen hardhat-wearing goatee-sporting (aka fascist-adjacent, TBH) “good union jobs for white union members” construction dudes.
But, in any objective analysis, the actual person-hour jobs are in long-term lifecycle maintainance and cleaning the buses or trains. Not in the faux-proletariat short-term bullshit manufacturing.
More deployed buses = more work. But not the right kind of work!
Simply but, the more buses you buy (from whomever makes the best buses, not the fucking shit-class hello-1970-is-calling locally-procured shit-on-wheels trade-protected we-hate-passengers fuck-you million-dollar atavistic rattling constantly-breaking-down throwbacks) then the more bus drivers, bus maintainers, bus cleaners, you get to employ. And to employ over decades! Not just for the three years your “good manufacturing jobs for good American Workers” Potemkin asembly plant endures.
If your buses (or trams, or trains, or whatever) cost 2x or 3x the going global rate, then you get to pay 1x or 2x to rent-seeking pig-fucking scum-sucker consultants, ONCE, and then you have a bus/train fleet that is a half or a third of what it could have been, and you screw over your passengers, you potential passengers, your operating staff asnd your maintance staff for decades.
In short, death is too kind a fate for any involved in these scams, in any way.
To the credit of Hochul & the MTA, the R262 procurement solicits proposals for state-paid railcars not under the Buy America Act, but offers the possibilty of some preference for built in NY railcars. See https://substack.com/home/post/p-205382026
Also, Hochul vetoed the bill which would have required 2 persons on practically all NYC transit trains, a bill which appears to have been largely driven by the “good American jobs” argument.
However, any state-wide official has to consider the upstate vote. Maintenance and cleaning jobs in NYC do not get votes in upstate NY.
To the credit of Hochul & the MTA, the R262 procurement solicits proposals for state-paid railcars not under the Buy America Act, but offers the possibilty of some preference for built in NY railcars. See https://substack.com/home/post/p-205382026
Also, Hochul vetoed the bill which would have required 2 persons on practically all NYC transit trains, a bill which appears to have been largely driven by the “good American jobs” argument.
However, any state-wide official has to consider the upstate vote. Maintenance and cleaning jobs in NYC do not get votes in upstate NY.
AC Transit (Oakland, California) bought about 300 Van Hool Belgian buses starting in 2003. The “AC” stands for Alameda County. AC Transit did this in spite of Gillig having its headquarters and manufacturing in Alameda County.
That would require someone at CTDOT picking up the phone and calling up the MTA, or vice versa.
Well spoken without giving energy to the malignant narcissist.
Alon is correct. The ETA paper, focused on thru-running, misses the point. The FTA report is intended to justify massive infrastructure activity, which is a political objective. The mention of thru-running in the FTA report is wallpaper, to cover over defects in the broader plan.
Tunnelvision has posted detailed information about why it’s 20 an hour. Ruby slippers are difficult to find these days. Perhaps clapping harder?
20 per tunnel would give you 80 trains per hour in total or 40 per direction? Still less than 48 per direction I guess.
Because Newark, I hope this isn’t a revelation, isn’t in Manhattan. Neither is New Rochelle. Likely nothing about the “Erie Loop” either. Trains could run through from Suffern to Long Beach. Or New Haven.
The cat wandered off when I giggled earlier. She wasn’t here for my laughing. Unfortunately the other two did hear me and want foooooooooooood.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China_National_Highway_110_traffic_jam
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_disaster
Replace almost all of the three fleets?
Send the red trains to White Plains they quite happily go through Mount Vernon West and keep going. Send the blue trains to Stamford they slow down and stop soon after the third rail runs out. I suppose a few Hudson Line trains could wander out to Long Island. They’d have lots of red trains loitering about, they could send Hudson Line trains to the New Haven line too. How ever many Hudson Line trains you send through to whereever is how many trains from New Jersey can’t.
The trains from New Jersey going to Long Island cannot simultaneously go to Grand Central. It’s a pity railfans that want to make a living at this can’t keep track of two or three things at once.
Huh?
The red trains can use overhead wire or third rail depending on where they are. If you send blue trains, the ones that are third-rail-only trains, to places that only have overhead wire they slow down and stop soon after the third rail runs out. Same thing happens for overhead-wire-only trains in places with only third rail, it doesn’t work out. Almost all of the fleets would need to be replaced. With more expensive trains. ( having two things on a vehicle costs more than having one thing. ) So that people who are dissatisfied with the McDonald’s on Sutphin Blvd just outside the Jamaica LIRR station can have a one seat ride to Penn Staiton Newark and it’s McDonald’s. With twice as many disruptions!!