In the Bronx, the Metro-North Harlem Line runs north-south, west of the 2/5 subway lines on White Plains Road and east of the 4 on Jerome Avenue and the B/D on Grand Concourse. It makes multiple stops, all served rather infrequently, currently about every half hour, with some hourly midday gaps, at premium fare. The north-south bus lines most directly parallel to the line, the Bx15 and Bx41, ranked #20 and #24 respectively in ridership on the New York City Transit system in 2019, though both have lost considerable ground since the pandemic. Overall, there is serious if not extremely high demand for service at those stations. There is already a fair amount of reverse-peak ridership: while those half-hourly frequencies can’t compete with the subway for service to Manhattan, they are the only non-car option for reverse-peak service to White Plains, and Fordham gets additional frequencies as well as some trains to Stamford. A city report from 2011 says that Fordham has 51 inbound passengers and 3,055 outbound ones boarding per weekday on Metro-North. Figuring out how to improve service in the Bronx requires a paradigm shift in how commuter rail is conceived in North America. Fordham’s reverse-peak service is a genuinely hard scheduling question, which we’re having to wrestle with as we’re proposing a (much) faster and smoother set of timetables for Northeast Corridor trains. Together, they make for a nontrivial exercise in tradeoffs on a busy commuter line, in which all options leave something to be desired.

Harlem Line local service

The bulk of demand from Fordham is local service, mostly toward Manhattan. The area is a bedroom community: within 1 km of the station at Park and Fordham there are 35,338 employed residents and only 22,515 jobs as of 2019; the largest destination is Manhattan (12,734 commuters), followed by the Bronx (7,744), then the rest of the city (8,069 across three boroughs), and only then Westchester (2,207), Long Island (1,660), and Connecticut (220). But to an extent, the station’s shed is larger for reverse-commute service, because people can connect from the Bx12 bus, which ranked second in the city behind the M15 in both 2019 and 2022; in contrast, Manhattan-bound commuters are taking the subway if they live well east or west of the station along Fordham. Nonetheless, the dominance of commutes to city destinations means that the most important service is to the rest of the city.

Indeed, the nearest subway stations have high subway ridership. The city report linked in the lede cites ridership of 11,521 on the B/D and another 12,560 on the 4 every weekday, as of 2012; both stations saw declines by 2019. The West Bronx’s hilly terrain makes these stations imperfect substitutes for each other and for the Metro-North station, despite the overlap in the walk sheds – along Fordham, Park is 600 meters from the Concourse and 950 from Jerome. Nonetheless, “roughly the same as either of the Fordham stations on the subway” should be a first-order estimate for the ridership potential; better Metro-North service would provide a much faster option to East Harlem and Grand Central, but conversely require an awkward transfer to get to points south, which predominate among destinations of workers from the area, who tilt working-class and therefore peak in Midtown South and not in the 50s:

Adding up all the Bronx stations on the line – Wakefield, Woodlawn, Williams Bridge, Botanical Garden, Fordham, Tremont, Melrose – we get 170,049 employed residents (as always, as of 2019), of whom 62,837 work in Manhattan. The line is overall in a subway desert, close to the 4 and B/D but along hills, and not so close to the 2/5 to the east; several tens of thousands of boardings are plausible if service is improved. For comparison, the combination of Westchester, Putnam, and Dutchess Counties has 115,185 Manhattan-bound commuters, split across the Harlem Line, the Hudson Line, and the inner New Haven Line. The Bronx is thus likely to take a majority of Manhattan-bound ridership on the Harlem Line, though not an overwhelming one.

To serve all this latent demand, it is obligatory to run more local service. A minimum service frequency of a train every 10 minutes is required. The current outbound schedule is 20 minutes from Grand Central to Fordham, and about four of those are a slowdown in the Grand Central throat that can be waived (the current speed limit is 10 miles per hour for the last mile; the infrastructure can largely fit trains running three times that fast almost all the way to the bumpers). Lower frequency than this would not really make use of the line’s speed.

Moreover, using the track chart as of 2015 and current (derated) M7 technical performance, the technical trip time is 18 minutes, over which 20 minutes is not too onerously padded; but removing the derating and the four gratuitous minutes crawling into and out of Grand Central, this is about 14 minutes, with some pad. The speed zones can be further increased by using modern values of cant and cant deficiency on curves, but the difference isn’t very large, only 40 seconds, since this is a section with frequent stops. It’s fast, and to reinforce this, even higher frequency may be warranted, a train every 7.5 or 6 or even 5 minutes.

There is room on the tracks for all of this. The issue is that this requires dedicating the local tracks on the Harlem Line in the Bronx to local service, instead of having trains pass the platforms without stopping. This, in turn, requires slowing down some trains from Westchester to make more local stops. Current peak traffic on the Harlem Line is 15 trains per hour, of which 14 run past Mount Vernon West, the current northern limit of the four-track section, and 13 don’t stop in the Bronx at all. The line has three tracks through past Crestwood, and the stations are set up with room for a fourth track, but a full 10 trains per hour, including one that stops in the Bronx, run past Crestwood. In theory it’s possible to run 12 trains per hour to Mount Vernon West making all stops, and 12 trains past it skipping Bronx stops; this slows down the express trains from White Plains, which currently skip seven stops south of White Plains to Mount Vernon West inclusive, but higher speeds in the Bronx, speeding up the Grand Central throat, higher frequency, and lower schedule padding would together lead to improvements in trip times. However, this introduces a new set of problems, for which we need to consider the New Haven Line too.

Harlem Line express service and the New Haven Line

Currently, the New Haven Line runs 20 trains per hour into Grand Central at the peak. This number will go down after Penn Station Access opens in 2027, but not massively; a split of 6-8 trains per hour into Penn Station and 16-18 into Grand Central, with the new service mildly increasing total throughput, is reasonable.

Today, New Haven Line locals stop at Fordham, and nowhere else in the Bronx. This is inherited from the trackage rights agreement between the New York Central and the New York, New Haven and Hartford Railroad, allowing the latter to make only one stop in the Bronx on the former’s territory; it used to be Woodlawn, the branch point, but has been moved to Fordham, which has busier reverse-peak traffic. The two railroads merged in 1969, and all service is currently run by Metro-North, but the practice persists. This is not necessarily stupid: the New Haven locals are long – Stamford is 53 km from Grand Central, 50% farther than White Plains – and a system in which the New Haven trains are more express than the Harlem trains is not by itself stupid, depending on other system constraints. Unfortunately, this setup introduces all manners of constraints into the system:

1. Fordham is a local-only station, and thus New Haven locals have to use the local tracks, using awkwardly-placed switches to get between the express and the local tracks. In fact, all stations up to and including Woodlawn are local-only; the first station with platforms on the express tracks is Wakefield, just north of the split between the two lines.
2. If there are 12 Harlem Line trains per hour expressing through the Bronx, then the New Haven Line is limited to about 12 trains per hour as well unless the local trains make all the Bronx local stops.
3. The Hudson Line has a flat junction with the Harlem Line at Mott Haven Junction, which means that any regular schedule has to have gaps to let Hudson Line trains pass; current peak Hudson Line traffic is 11 trains per hour, but it was 14 before corona.

This leads to a number of different options, each problematic in its own way.

Maximum separation

In this schedule, all Harlem Line trains run local, and all New Haven Line trains run express in the Bronx. This is the easiest to timetable – the junction between the two lines, unlike Mott Haven, is grade-separated. This also requires splitting the Hudson Line between local and express tracks, so delays will still propagate in any situation unless the Hudson Line is moved to the Empire Connection (6-8 trains per hour can stay on the current route); but in a future with Penn Station Access West, building such service, it does allow for neat separation of the routes, and I usually crayon it this way in very high-investment scenarios with multiple through-running tunnels.

But in the near future, it is a massive slowdown for Harlem Line riders who currently have express service from White Plains to Manhattan. The current peak timetable has a 15-minute difference between local and express trains on this section; this figure is padded but not massively so, and conversely, higher speeds on curves increase the express train speed premium.

It also severs the connection between the Bronx and the New Haven Line, unless passengers take east-west buses to the Penn Station Access stations. It is possible to add infill at Wakefield on the New Haven Line: this is north of the junction with the Harlem Line, but barely, so the separation between the lines is short, and a transfer station is feasible. But it wouldn’t be a cross-platform transfer, and so Fordham-Stamford service would still be degraded.

Locals run local

The New Haven Line locals can make local stops in the Bronx. It’s a slowdown of a few minutes for those trains – the current outbound timetable is 18 minutes from Grand Central to Fordham, two minutes faster than on Harlem Line locals while skipping Melrose and Tremont. Overall, it’s a slowdown of around six minutes; the current speed zones are 60 and 75 mph, and while raising the speed limits increases the extent of the slowdown (most of the track geometry is good for 160 km/h), getting new trainsets with better acceleration performance decreases it, and overall it’s likely a wash.

From there, the service pattern follows. New Haven Line locals to Grand Central have little reason to run more frequently than every 10 minutes at peak – the local stations are 30-60 minutes out of Grand Central today, and this is massively padded, but with the timetables Devin produced, fixing the Grand Central throat, New Rochelle would still be 20 minutes out on a local train (stopping at Fordham only as is the case today) and Stamford would be 45 minutes out. What’s more, there will be some local trains to Penn Station starting in three years, boosting the effective frequency to a train every five minutes, with a choice of Manhattan station if express trains can be made to stop at New Rochelle with a timed connection.

Now, if there are six local trains per hour in the Bronx going to Stamford, then the Harlem Line locals only take six trains per hour of their own, and then 12 trains should run express from Wakefield to Harlem. What they do to the north depends. The simplest option is to have all of them make all stops, which costs White Plains 7-8 minutes relative to the express stopping pattern. But if the line can be four-tracked to Crestwood, then half the trains can run local to White Plains and half can run nonstop between Wakefield or Mount Vernon West and White Plains. Two local stations, Scarsdale and Hartsdale, are in two-track territory, but timetabling a local to follow an express when both run every 10 minutes and there are only two local stops’ worth of speed difference is not hard.

The New Haven Line, meanwhile, gets 12 express trains per hour. Those match 12 express Harlem Line trains per hour, and then there’s no more room on the express tracks; Hudson Line trains have to use the local tracks and somehow find slots for the northbound trains to cross both express tracks at-grade.

Status quo

The status quo balances Bronx-Stamford connectivity with speed. Bear in mind, the New Haven Line today has truly massive timetable padding, to the point that making trains make all six stops in the Bronx and not just Fordham would still leave New Rochelle locals faster than they are today if the other speedup treatments were put into place. But the status quo would allow New Rochelle, Larchmont, Rye, and Greenwich to take maximum advantage of the speedup, which is good. The problem with it is that it forces New Haven Line locals to take slots from both the express tracks and the local tracks in the Bronx.

In this situation, the New Haven Line still runs six locals and 12 express trains to Grand Central per hour. The Harlem Line is reduced to six express trains through the Bronx and has to run 12 trains local. Transfers at Wakefield allow people in suburbs south of White Plains to get on a faster train, but this in effect reduces the effective peak-of-peak throughput from the suburbs to Manhattan to just six trains per hour.

Express Fordham station

Rebuilding Fordham as an express station means there’s no longer any need to figure out which trains stop there and which don’t: all would. Then the New Haven Line would run express and the Harlem would either run local or run a mix.

The problem is that Fordham is in a constrained location, where such a rebuild is hard:

The line is below-grade, with a tunnel from Fordham Road to 189th Street. The platforms are short and narrow, and partly overlap the tunnel. Any conversion has to involve two island platforms north of the tunnel, where there is room but only if the right-of-way is expanded a little, at the expense of some parkland, and possibly a lane of Webster Avenue. The cost would not be pretty, independently of the inability of the MTA to build anything on a reasonable budget.

That said, the timetables on the Northeast Corridor require some infrastructure intervention to smooth things, like grade-separating some junctions for hundreds of millions of dollars each. New Rochelle, which has only a local platform southbound, should almost certainly be rebuilt as a full express stop. So rebuilding Fordham is not out of the question, even if the cost is high (which it is).

In this situation, all New Haven Line trains should use the express tracks. Thus, as in the status quo alternative, the Harlem Line gets six express trains, the other trains having to run local. Potentially, there may be a schedule in which the New Haven Line runs 16 trains to Grand Central and eight to Penn Station, and then the Harlem Line can get eight local and eight express trains; but then the local trains have to be carrying the load well into Westchester, and four-tracking the line to Crestwood is likely obligatory.

The New Haven Line and intercity trains

The above analysis elides one important factor: intercity trains. The current practice in the United States is a three-way separation of urban rail, suburban commuter rail, and intercity rail, with fares designed to discourage riders from taking trains that are not in their sector. However, in much the same way the best industry practice is to charge mode-neutral fares within cities, it is also valuable to charge mode-neutral fares between them. In other words, it’s useful to look at the impact of permitting people with valid commuter rail tickets to take intercity trains, without seat reservations.

To be clear, this means that at rush hour, there are going to be standees on busy commuter routes including Stamford-New York and Trenton-New York. But it’s not necessarily bad. The intercity trip time in our timetables between Stamford and New York is around 29 minutes without high-speed bypasses; the standing time would be less than some subway riders endure today – in the morning rush hour the E train departs Jamaica Center full and takes 34 minutes to get to its first Manhattan stop. And then there’s the issue of capacity: commuter trains on the New Haven Line are eight cars long, intercity trains can be straightforwardly expanded to 16 cars by lengthening the platforms at a very small number of stations.

And if the intercity trains mop up some of the express commuter rail traffic, then the required service on the New Haven Line at rush hour greatly decreases. An intercity train, twice as long as a commuter train (albeit with somewhat fewer seats and less standing space per car), could plausibly displace so much commuter traffic that the peak traffic on the line could be reduced, say to 18 trains per hour from today’s 20. Moreover, the reduction would be disproportionately at longer distance: passengers west of Stamford would not have any replacement intercity train unless they backtracked, but passengers east of Stamford would likely switch. This way, the required New Haven Line traffic shrinks to 12 local trains per hour and six express trains; half the locals run to Penn Station and half to Grand Central, and all express trains run to Grand Central.

In that situation, we can rerun the scenarios for what to do about Fordham; the situation generally improves, since less commuter traffic is required. The maximum separation scenario finally permits actual separation – the Hudson Line would run on the express tracks into Grand Central and have to cross the southbound Harlem Line locals at Mott Haven Junction, with predictable gaps between trains. The locals-run-local scenario gives Harlem Line express trains more wiggle room to slot between New Haven Line express trains. The status quo option lets the Harlem Line run six local trains and 12 express trains, though that likely underserves the Bronx. Converting Fordham to an express stop straightforwardly works with zero, six, or 12 express Harlem Line trains per hour.

Or maybe not. It’s fine to assume that letting passengers get on a train that does Stamford-Penn Station in 29 minutes and New Haven-Penn Station in 57 for the price of a commuter pass is going to remove passengers from the express commuter trains and put them onto longer intercity trains. But by the same token, the massive speed improvements to the other stops could lead to an increase in peak demand. The current trip time to Stamford is 1:12 on a local train; cutting that to 45 minutes means so much faster trips to the suburbs in between that ridership could increase to the point of requiring even more service. I’m not convinced on this – the modal split for peak commutes to Manhattan is already very high (Metro-North claimed 80% in the 2000s), and these suburbs are incredibly NIMBY. But it’s worth considering. At the very least, more local service is easier to add to the timetable than more express service – locals to Grand Central don’t share tracks with intercities at all, and even locals to Penn Station only do on a controllable low-speed section in Queens.

Blair Lorenzo and I gave the talk yesterday, as advertised. The slide deck was much more in her style than in mine – more pictures, fewer words – so it may not be exactly clear what we said.

Beyond the written report itself (now up in web form, not just a PDF), we talked about some low-hanging fruit. What we’re asking for is not a lot of money – the total capital cost of electrification and high platforms everywhere and the surface bottlenecks we talk about like Hunter Junction is around $6 billion, of which $800 million for Portal Bridge need to happen regardless of anything else; Penn Reconstruction is $7 billion and the eminently cancelable Penn Expansion is $17 billion. However, it is a lot of coordination, of different agencies, of capital and operations, and so on. So it’s useful to talk about how to, in a way, fail gracefully – that is, how to propose something that, if it’s reduced to a pilot program, will still be useful.

The absolute wrong thing to do in a pilot program situation is to just do small things all over, like adding a few midday trains. That would achieve little. There is already alternation between hourly and half-hourly commuter trains in most of the New York region; this doesn’t do much when the subway or a subway + suburban bus combination runs every 10-12 minutes (and should be running every six). The same can be said for CityTicket, which incrementally reduces fares on commuter rail within New York City but doesn’t integrate fares with the subway and therefore produces little ridership increase.

Instead, the right thing to do is focus on one strong corridor. We propose this for phase 1, turning New Brunswick-Stamford or New Brunswick-New Rochelle into a through-line running every 10 minutes all day, as soon as Penn Station Access opens. But there are other alternatives that I think fall into the low-hanging fruit category.

One is the junction fixes, like Hunter as mentioned above (estimated at $300 million), or similar-complexity Shell in New Rochelle, which is most likely necessary for any decent intercity rail upgrade on the Northeast Corridor. It costs money, but not a lot of it by the standards of what’s being funded through federal grants, including BIL money for the Northeast Corridor, which is relevant to both Hunter and Shell.

The other is Queens bus redesign. I hope that as our program at Marron grows, we’ll be able to work on a Queens bus redesign that assumes that it’s possible to connect to the LIRR with fare integration and high frequency; buses would not need to all divert to Flushing or Jamaica, but could run straight north-south, leaving the east-west Manhattan-bound traffic to faster, more efficient trains.

As part of our high-speed rail program at Marron, I designed and other people made a 3D model of the train station I referenced in 2015 in what was originally a trollish proposal, upgraded to something more serious. For now there’s still a password: letsredothis. This is a playable level, so have a look around.

The playable 3D model shows what Penn Station could look like if it were rebuilt from the ground up, based on best industry practices. It is deliberately minimalistic: a train station is an interface between the train and the city it serves, and therefore its primary goal is to get passengers between the street or the subway and the platform as efficiently as possible. But minimalism should not be conflated with either architectural plainness (see below on technical limitations) or poor passenger convenience. The open design means that pedestrian circulation for passengers would be dramatically improved over today’s infamously cramped passageways.

Much of the design for this station is inspired by modern European train stations, including Berlin Hauptbahnhof (opened 2006), the under-construction Stuttgart 21 (scheduled to open 2025), and the reconstruction of Utrecht Central (2013-16); Utrecht, in turn, was inspired by the design of Shinagawa in Tokyo.

As we investigate which infrastructure projects are required for a high-speed rail program in the Northeast, we will evaluate the place of this station as well. Besides intangible benefits explained below in background, there are considerable tangible benefits in faster egress from the train to the street.

Moreover, the process that led to this blueprint and model can be reused elsewhere. In particular, as we explain in the section on pedestrian circulation, elements of the platform design should be used for the construction of subway stations on some lines under consideration in New York and other American cities, to minimize both construction costs and wasted time for passengers to navigate underground corridors. In that sense, this model can be viewed not just as a proposal for Penn Station, but also as an appendix to our report on construction costs. 

Background

New York Penn Station is unpopular among users, and has been since the current station opened in 1968 (“One entered the city like a God; one scuttles in now like a rat” -Vincent Scully). From time to time, proposals for rebuilding the station along a better or grander design have been floated, usually in connection with a plan for improving the track level below.

Right now, such a track-level improvement is beginning construction, in the form of the Gateway Project and its Hudson Tunnel Project (HTP). The purpose of HTP is to add two new tracks’ worth of rail capacity from New Jersey to Penn Station; currently, there are only two mainline tracks under the Hudson, the North River Tunnels (NRT), with a peak throughput of 24 trains per hour across Amtrak’s intercity trains and New Jersey Transit’s (NJT) commuter trains, and very high crowding levels on the eve of the pandemic; 24 trains per hour is usually the limit of mainline rail, with higher figures only available on more self-contained systems. In contrast, going east of Penn Station, there are four East River Tunnel (ERT) tracks to Long Island and the Northeast Corridor, with a pre-corona peak throughput of not 48 trains per hour but only about 40.

Gateway is a broader project than HTP, including additional elements on both the New Jersey and Manhattan sides. Whereas HTP has recently been funded, with a budget of $14-16 billion, the total projected cost of Gateway is $50 billion, largely unfunded, of which $20 billion comprises improvements and additions to Penn Station, most of which are completely unnecessary.

Those additions include the $7 billion Penn Reconstruction and the $13 billion Penn Expansion. Penn Reconstruction is a laundry list of improvements to the existing Penn Station, including 29 new staircases and escalators from the platforms to the concourses, additional concourse space, total reconstruction of the upper concourse to simplify the layout, and new entrances from the street to the station. It’s not a bad project, but the cost is disproportionate to the benefits. Penn Expansion would build upon it and condemn the block south of the station, the so-called Block 780, to excavate new tracks; it is a complete waste of money even before it has been funded, as scarce planner resources are spent on it.

The 3D model as depicted should be thought of as an alternative form of Penn Reconstruction, for what is likely a similar cost. It bakes in assumptions on service, as detailed below, that assume both commuter and intercity trains run efficiently and in a coordinated manner.

Station description

The station in the model is fully daylit, with no obstruction above the platforms. There are eight wide platforms and 16 tracks, down from 11 platforms and 21 tracks today. The station box is bounded by 7th Avenue, 31st Street, 8th Avenue, and 33rd Street, as today; also as today, the central platforms continue well to the west of 8th Avenue, using the existing Moynihan Train Hall. No expansion of the footprint is required. The existing track 1 (the southernmost) becomes the new track 1A and the existing track 21 becomes the new track 8B.

The removal of three platforms and five tracks and some additional track-level work combine to make the remaining platforms 11.5 meters wide each, compared with a range of 9-10 meters at some comparable high-throughput stations, such as Tokyo.

With wide platforms, the platforms themselves can be part of the station. A persistent difference between American and European train stations is that at American stations, even beloved ones like Grand Central, the station is near where the tracks are, whereas in Europe, the station is where the tracks are. Grand Central has a majestic waiting hall, but the tracks and platforms themselves are in cramped, dank areas with low ceilings and poor lighting. The 3D model, in contrast, integrated the tracks into the station structure: the model includes concessions below most escalator and stair banks, which could offer retail, fast food, or coffee. Ticketing machines can be placed throughout the complex, on the platforms as well as at places along the access corridors that are not needed for rush hour pedestrian circulation. This, more than anything, explains the minimalistic design, with no concourses: concourses are not required when there is direct access between the street and the platforms.

For circulation, there are two walkways, labeled East and West Walkways; these may be thought of as 7⅓th and 7⅔th Avenues, respectively. West End Corridor is kept, as is the circulation space under 33rd Street connecting West End Corridor and points east, currently part of the station concourse. A new north-south corridor called East End Corridor appears between the station and 7th Avenue, with access to the 1/2/3 trains.

What about Madison Square Garden?

Currently, Penn Station is effectively in the basement of Madison Square Garden (MSG) and Two Penn Plaza. Both buildings need to come down to build this vision.

MSG has come under attack recently for competing for space with the train station; going back to the early 2010s, plans for rebuilding Penn Station to have direct sunlight have assumed that MSG should move somewhere else, and this month, City Council voted to extend MSG’s permit by only five years and not the expected 10, in effect creating a five-year clock for a plan to daylight Penn Station. There have been recent plans to move MSG, such as the Vishaan Chakrabarti vision for Penn Station; the 3D model could be viewed as the rail engineering answer to that architecture-centric vision.

Two Penn Plaza is a 150,000 m^2 skyscraper, in a city where developers can build a replacement for $900 million in 2018 prices.

The complete removal of both buildings makes work on Penn Station vastly simpler. The station is replete with columns, obstructing sight lines, taking up space between tracks, and constraining all changes. The 3D model’s blueprint takes care to respect column placement west of 8th Avenue, where the columns are sparser and it’s possible to design tracks around them, but it is not possible to do so between 7th and 8th Avenues. Conversely, with the columns removed, it is not hard to daylight the station.

Station operations

The operating model at this station is based on consistency and simplicity. Every train has a consistent platform to use. Thus, passengers would be able to know their track number months in advance, just as in Japan and much of Europe, train reservations already include the track number at the station. The scramble passengers face at Penn Station today, waiting to see their train’s track number posted minutes in advance and then rushing to the platform, would be eliminated.

Each approach track thus splits into two tracks flanking the same platform. This is the same design used at Stuttgart 21 and Berlin Hauptbahnhof: if a last-minute change in track assignment is needed, it can be guaranteed to face the same platform, limiting passenger confusion. At each platform, numbered south to north as today, the A track is to the south of the B track, but the trains on the two tracks would be serving the same line and coming from and going to the same approach track. This way, a train can enter the A track at a station while the previous train is still departing the B track, which provides higher capacity.

The labels on the signage are by destination:

• Platform 1: eastbound trains from the HTP, eventually going to a through-tunnel to Grand Central
• Platform 2: westbound trains to the HTP, connecting from Grand Central
• Platform 3: eastbound trains from the preexisting North River Tunnels (NRT) to the existing East River Tunnels (ERT) under 32nd Street
• Platform 4: eastbound intercity trains using the NRT and ERT under 32nd Street
• Platform 5: westbound intercity trains using the NRT and ERT under 32nd Street
• Platform 6: westbound trains from the ERT under 32nd Street to the NRT
• Platform 7: eastbound trains to the ERT under 33rd Street and the LIRR, eventually connecting to a through-tunnel from the Hudson Line
• Platform 8: westbound trains from LIRR via the ERT under 33rd Street, eventually going to a through-tunnel to the Hudson Line

Signage labels except for the intercity platforms 4 and 5 state the name of the commuter railway that the trains would go to. Thus, a train from Trenton to Stamford running via the Northeast Corridor and the under-construction Penn Station Access line would use platform 3, and is labeled as Metro-North, as it goes toward Metro-North territory; the same train going back, using platform 6, is labeled as New Jersey Transit, as it goes toward New Jersey.

Such through-running is obligatory for efficient station operations. There are many good reasons to run through, which are described in detail in a forthcoming document by the Effective Transit Alliance. But for one point about efficiency, it takes a train a minimum of 10 minutes to turn at a train station and change direction in the United States, and this is after much optimization (Penn Station’s current users believe they need 18-22 minutes to turn). In contrast, a through-train can unload at even an extremely busy station like Penn in not much more than a minute; the narrow platforms of today’s station could clear a full rush hour train in emergency conditions today in about 3-4 minutes, and the wide platforms of the 3D model could do so in about 1.5 minutes in emergencies and less in regular operations.

Supporting infrastructure assumptions

The assumption for the model is that the HTP is a done deal; it was recently federally funded, in a way that is said to be difficult to repeal in the future in the event of a change in government. The HTP tunnel is slated to open in 2035; the current timetable is that full operations can only begin in 2038 after a three-year closure of NRT infrastructure for long-term repairs, but in fact those repairs can be done in weekend windows—indeed, present-day rail timetables through the NRT assume that one track is out for a 55-hour period each weekend, but investigative reporting has shown that Amtrak takes advantage of this outage only once every three months. If repairs are done every weekend, then it will be possible to refurbish the tunnels by 2035, for full four-track operations in 12 years.

The HTP approach to Penn Station assumes that trains from the tunnel would veer south, eventually to tracks to be excavated out of Block 780 for $13 billion. However, nothing in the current design of the tunnel forces tracks to veer so far south to Penn Expansion. There is room, respecting the support columns west of 8th Avenue, to connect the HTP approach to the new platforms 1 and 2, or for that matter to present-day tracks 1-5.

It is also assumed that Penn Station Access (PSA) is completed; the project’s current timeline is that it will open in 2026, offering Metro-North service from the New Haven Line to Penn Station. As soon as PSA opens, trains should run through to New Jersey, for the higher efficiency mentioned above.

The additional pieces of major infrastructure required for this vision are a tunnel from Penn Station to Grand Central, and an Empire Connection realignment.

The Penn Station-Grand Central connection (from platforms 1 and 2) has been discussed for at least 20 years, but not acted upon, since it would force coordination between New Jersey Transit and Metro-North. Such a connection would offer riders at both systems the choice between either Manhattan station—and the choice would be on the same train, whereas on the LIRR, the same choice offered by East Side Access cuts the frequency to each terminal in half, which has angered Long Island commuters.

Overall, it would be a tunnel of about 2 km without stations. It would require some mining under the corner of Penn 11, the building east of 7th Avenue between 31st and 32nd Street, but only to the same extent that was already done in the 1900s to build the ERT under 32nd Street. Subsequently, the tunnel would nimbly weave between older tunnels, using an aggressive 4% grade with modern electric trainsets (the subway even climbs 5.4% out of a station at Manhattan Bridge, whereas this would descend 4% from a station). The cost should be on the order of hundreds of millions of dollars, not billions—the billions of dollars in per-km cost in New York today are driven by station construction rather than tunnels, and by poor project delivery methods that can be changed to better ones.

The Empire Connection realignment is a shorter tunnel, but in a more constrained environment. Today, Amtrak trains connect between Penn Station and Upstate New York via the existing connection, going in tunnel under Riverside Park until it joins the tracks of the current Hudson Line in Spuyten Duyvil. Plans for electrifying the connection and using it for commuter rail exist but are not yet funded; these should be reactivated, since otherwise there’s nowhere for trains from the 33rd Street ERT to run through to the west.

It is necessary to realign the last few hundred meters of the Empire Connection. The current alignment is single-track and connects to more southerly parts of the station, rather than to the optimal location at the northern end. This is a short tunnel (perhaps 500 meters) without stations, but the need to go under an active railyard complicates construction. That said, this too should cost on the order of hundreds of millions of dollars, not billions.

Finally, platforms 3-6 all feed the same approach tracks on both sides, but in principle they could be separated into two. There are occasional long-term high-cost plans to fully separate out intercity rail tracks from commuter tracks even in New York, with dedicated tunnels all the way. The model does not assume that such plans are actualized, but if they are, then there is room to connect the new high-speed rail approach tunnel to platforms 4 and 5 at both ends.

Overall, the model gives the station just 20 turnouts, down from hundreds today. This is a more radical version of the redesign of Utrecht Station in the 2010s, which removed pass-through tracks, simplified the design, and reduced the number of turnouts from 200 to 70, in order to make the system more reliable; turnouts are failure-prone, and should be installed only when needed based on current or anticipated train movements.

Pedestrian circulation

The station in the model has very high pedestrian throughput. The maximum capacities are 100 passengers/minute on a wide escalator, 49 per minute per meter of staircase width, and 82 per minute per meter of walkway width. A full 12-car commuter train has about 1,800 passengers; the vertical access points—a minimum of seven up escalators, five 2.7 meter wide staircases, and three elevators per platform—can clear these in about 80 seconds. In the imperfect conditions of rush hour service or emergency evacuation, this is doable in about 90 seconds. A 16-car intercity train has fewer passengers, since all passengers are required to have a seat, and thus they can evacuate even faster in emergency conditions.

Not only is the throughput high but also the latency is low. At the current Penn Station, it can take six minutes just to get between a vertical access point and an exit, if the passenger gets off at the wrong part of the platform. In contrast, with the modeled station, the wide platforms make it easier for passengers to choose the right exit, and connect to a street corner or subway entrance within a maximum of about three minutes for able-bodied adults.

This has implications for station design more generally. At the Transit Costs Project, we have repeatedly heard from American interviewees that subway stations have to have full-length mezzanines for the purposes of fire evacuation, based on NFPA 130. In fact, NFPA 130 requires evacuation in four minutes of throughput, and in six minutes when starting from the most remote point on the platform; at a train station where trains are expected to run every 2-2.5 minutes at rush hour and unload most of their passengers in regular service, it is dead letter.

Thus, elements of the platform design can be copied and pasted into subway expansion programs with little change. A subway station could have vertical circulation at both ends of the platform as portrayed at any of the combined staircase and escalator banks, with wider staircases if there’s no need for passengers to walk around them. No mezzanine is required, nor complex passageways: any train up to the size of the largest New York City Subway trains could satisfy the four-minute rule with a 10-meter island platform (albeit barely for 10-car lettered lines).

Technical limitations and architecture

The model is designed around interactivity and playability. This has forced us to make some artistic compromises, compared with what one sees in 3D architectural renderings that are not interactive. To run on an average home machine, the design has had to reduce its polygon count and limit the detail of renderings that are far from the camera position.

For the same reason, the level shows the exterior of Moynihan Station as an anchor, but not the other buildings across from the station at 31st Street, 33rd Street, or 7th Avenue.

In reality, both East and West Walkways would be more architecturally notable than as they are depicted in the level. Our depiction was inspired by walkways above convention centers and airport terminals, but in reality, if this vision is built, then the walkways should be able to support themselves without relying too much on the tracks. Designs with massive columns flanking each elevator are possible, but so are designs with arches, through-arches, or tied arches, the latter two options avoiding all structural dependence on the track level.

Some more architectural elements could be included in an actual design based on this model, which could not be easily modeled in an interactive environment. The platforms certainly must have shelter from the elements, which could be simple roofs over the uncovered parts of the platform, or large glass panels spanning from 31st to 33rd Street, or even a glass dome large enough to enclose the walkways.

Finally, some extra features could be added. For example, there could be more vertical circulation between 7th Avenue and East End Corridor (which is largely a subway access corridor) than just two elevators—there could be stairs and escalators as well. There is also a lot of dead space as the tracks taper from the main of the station to the access tunnels, which could be used for back office space, ticket offices, additional concessions, or even some east-west walkways functioning as 31.5th and 32.5th Streets.