People have been asking about the Penn Station 3D model I posted at the beginning of the week (for a direct link, go here again and use letsredothis as a password). This post should be viewed as a combination of some addenda, including a top-down 2D blueprint and some more comments on how this can be built, and also some graphics contributed by Tunnelbuilder in comments, who sent some Grand Central profiles to me for posting to argue that it’s difficult to impossible to punch through to the station’s stub-end tracks and build through-running infrastructure.

The rebuilt Penn Station blueprint

This version highlights the underlying map of columns (which I flagrantly disrespect in the main block of the station):

The platforms are in magenta. The ochre paths are tracks and areas immediately next to them, 3.4 m wide since the track center to platform edge distance is 1.7 m in the American loading gauge; this leaves an uncolored strip, 1.1 m wide, for generous 4.5 m track centers (German standards allow 4 m). The elevators are in green with black Xes; staircases and escalators are in different shades of red. Partly transparent gray denotes streets and East and West Walkways. Partly transparent dark green denotes West and East End Corridors, the former about two-thirds deep (same as the subway passageways) and the latter one-third deep (same as the subway platforms); the green connection between them is the existing Connecting Concourse, portrayed as changing grade, with potential changes if it’s decided to place East End Corridor on the same grade as the West End. Partly transparent light blue denotes the footprint of Moynihan Train Hall. The scale is 10 pixels = 1 meter, with the black cube helping show scale.

How to build this

The sequence for construction should be as follows:

1. Madison Square Garden just got a five-year operating permit extension; previously it had always gotten 10-year permits. There is real impetus for change, at least at the level of City Council. This means that there are five years to work on the design and find MSG a new site in the city. In 2028, it should begin demolition, also including Two Penn Plaza.
2. The superblock between 31st Street, 7th Avenue, 33rd Street, and 8th Avenue should be hollowed out with direct access to the existing concourses. At this stage, East and West Walkways should be built, by a method that is either independent of what is below them (such as a tied arch) or is supported by columns at the middle of the future platform locations. In the latter case, it is necessary to take out some tracks out of service early, as the columns would hit them: tracks 10, 13, and 20 are all aligned near the centers of future platforms.
3. Temporary escalators and stairs should be dropped from the walkways to the existing platforms, as the concourses between the street and platform levels are removed and the tracks daylit.
4. Tracks should be closed in stages to permit moving the platforms according to the blueprint. The first stage should be the southernmost tracks, 1-4 or 1-5, because they don’t run through to the east, and in this period (early 2030s), most to all New Jersey Transit trains should be running through to the New Haven Line or the LIRR. If tracks 10, 13, and 20 are closed, then construction of future platforms 4, 5, and 8 can be accelerated, since tracks 8A and 8B are aligned with 19 and 21, and tracks 5A and 5B are aligned with 12 and 14.
5. After tracks 1-5 are replaced and platforms 1 and 2 are built, or potentially simultaneously, middle- and high-numbered platforms should be progressively replaced. With good operating practices, trains to and from New Jersey can be accommodated on six tracks (four New Jersey Transit tracks, two Amtrak), and LIRR trains using the tunnels under 33rd Street can be accommodated on about six or potentially four (current service fits on four, especially with the high capacity of tracks 18-21). This means that of tracks 6-21, 12 need to be operational at a given time, or maybe 10 in a crunch if there are compromises on LIRR capacity. Tracks 1, 3, 6, 9, 12, 14, 15, 17, 19, 21 are aligned with tracks 1A, 1B, 3A, 4A, 5A, 5B, 6A, 6B, 8A, 8B and may be able to stay in service for the duration of construction, in which case the process becomes much easier, requiring just two stages; in the worst case, four stages are required.

The deadline for this is that the Gateway tunnel (the Hudson Tunnel Project) is slated to open in 2035. The current plan is to then shut down the preexisting North River Tunnels for three years for repairs, but in fact, the repairs can be done on weekends; the New York Daily News found that only 13 times in four years did Amtrak in fact conduct any repairs in the tunnel, even though the weekend timetable is designed for one of the two tracks to be out for an entire weekend continuously. The new tunnel points toward the southern end of the Penn Station complex, and thus the new platforms 1 and 2 need to be in operation by 2035, giving seven years to build this part; the other tracks can potentially follow later, and tracks 18-21 in particular may be kept as they are longer, since the current platform 10 (tracks 18-19) is fairly wide and the current platform 11 (tracks 20-21) has many access points to the Connecting Concourse.

The Grand Central complication

The through-running plan implied in this design is that platforms 1 and 2 should connect to the Grand Central Lower Level, where Metro-North trains terminate (the Upper Level has additional Metro-North tracks, generally used by longer-distance trains). This requires the tunnel to thread between older tunnels, including subway tunnels. The following two diagrams are in profile, going south (left) to north (right); the second diagram continues north of the first one.

It’s possible to punch south (left) of the Lower Level while respecting every constraint, but not all of them at once. Two constraints are absolute:

• No interference with the 7 train tunnels
• No interference with the 6 train tunnel (labeled “SB local”)

These can be satisfied easily. However, all other constraints, which are serious, require some waivers, or picking and choosing:

• Keeping absolute grades to 4%, forcing the tunnel to go above the 7 and not below it (which requires clearing around 15 m in around 150 m of distance)
• Respecting the Lower Level loop track
• Respecting the disused Steinway Loop tunnel

If the latter two constraints are waivable, then the tunnel needs to clear around 1.5 m, for 6 m of diameter minus 4.5 m between the roof of the 7 tunnel and the floor of the 6 tunnel, in what looks like 40 horizontal m; it’s doable but with centimeters of slack, and may require waiving the 4% grade (though over such a short length it doesn’t matter – what matters is vertical curve radius, and the vertical curves can be built north of the 7 and south of the 6).

Two days ago, the federal government announced that it was funding the Hudson Tunnel Project, adding two new tunneled tracks between New Jersey and New York Penn Station. The total grant is $6.88 billion, representing slightly less than half of the projected cost, which is officially still $16 billion in year-of-expenditure dollars but may rise to $17 billion; nearly all of the rest of the budget is already matched in state grants from New York and New Jersey, and so for all intents and purposes, the project should be considered fully funded. Frustratingly, it’s an extremely expensive project, and yet its benefits are high that it may still pass a benefit-cost analysis – and the more operational improvements there are down the line, the higher the benefits.

The grant only covers the bare tunnels and a $2 billion project to do long-term repairs to the existing tunnels after damage suffered in Hurricane Sandy. The $14 billion new tunnels are the centerpiece of the wider $40 billion Gateway Program, which includes other items that are said to be necessary for an increase in capacity. But most of those items by cost are duds, such as the completely useless $7 billion Penn Station Expansion program to condemn an entire city block to add tracks, or the useful but not at this price $6 billion Penn Station Reconstruction program to improve pedestrian circulation at the existing station. There still remain necessary improvements on the surface to go along the Hudson Tunnel Project, but they are small – a junction fix here, some double-tracking of a single-track branch there, some high-platform projects to improve reliability yonder.

The reporting on the project says that it will be overseen by the Federal Transit Administration (FTA), not the mainline-specific Federal Railroad Administration (FRA). It looks like this is coming from the general bucket of money for mass transit in the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, rather than from the $30 billion dedicated to the Northeast Corridor; thus, the budget for other Northeast Corridor improvements should remain $30 billion, rather than $23.12 billion.

The issue of costs

The Hudson Tunnel Project is about five kilometers in length, from the portal on the western slope of the Palisades to the existing Penn Station:

The alignment, as can be seen in the picture, is not closely parallel to the existing tunnels. On the Manhattan side, the alignment is fixed in place, due to the construction of the Hudson Yards project since the project was first mooted in the early 2000s, when it was called Access to the Region’s Core (ARC); the only available alignment between building foundations is as depicted. Under the Hudson and in New Jersey, there are no such constraints.

What is far more suspicious is that 5 km of double-track tunnel, even partly underwater, even partly in Manhattan between skyscraper foundations, are said to cost $14 billion in total. This is not just the usual problem of high New York costs. Second Avenue Subway’s hard costs were 77% stations and station finishes and only 23% tunnels and systems; excluding the stations, and pro-rating the soft costs, the costs in 2022 dollars were only about $500 million per km. There is an underwater premium, but it doesn’t turn $500 million per km into nearly $3 billion per km, nor is the expected inflation rate over the project’s 2023-35 lifetime high enough to make a difference.

What’s more, the underwater premium is highest where the costs are already the lowest. The New York cost premium for civil infrastructure is rather small, only about a factor of around 3 over comparable European projects. Systems and finishes have a considerably higher premium, due to lack of standardization; stations have an even higher premium, due to overbuilding (the Second Avenue Subway stations were 2-3 times as big as necessary, and the two smaller ones were also deep-mined at an additional cost). The installation of systems like electrification and cables should not cost more underwater than underground – the construction of the tunnel and its lining is where the premium is. Whatever we think the underwater construction premium is – a factor of 2 is consistent with some Stockholm numbers and also with the original BART construction in the 1960s and early 70s – it should be lower in New York.

Some of it must come from ever worse project management and soft costs. The destruction of state capacity in the English-speaking world, and increasingly in nonnative English-speaking countries influenced by the UK like the Netherlands, is not a completed process; it is still ongoing. Soft costs keep rising, and the response to every failure is to add yet another layer of consultants or another layer of review. Second Avenue Subway phase 2 manages slightly higher per-km costs than phase 1, despite having less overbuilding, and from my encounters with the people in charge of capital construction at the MTA, it’s not hard to see why.

And yet, even relative to the highest costs of phase 2, Gateway is overpriced. The level of experience the people running this project have with capital construction at this scale is less than that of the MTA, and this should matter. And yet, even that doesn’t explain the large jump in costs.

Is it possible to do better?

Well, once the almost $16 billion for the project is there, it will be spent. The main reason one might oppose overpriced projects like Second Avenue Subway phase 2 even if their benefit-cost ratio is okay (which, for both phase 2 and the Hudson Tunnel Project, is iffy, though not obviously bad), is that pressure to reduce costs before approval can result in efficiencies. But once a budget is approved, nobody will make a serious effort to go significantly below it.

That said, the only smoking gun I have for how to make this project cheaper pertains to the $2 billion for fixing the existing tunnels. Currently, the timetables for both Amtrak and New Jersey Transit trains across the tunnels are written so that on weekends, only one of the two single-track tubes is in operation. Thus, maintenance work can be done on the other tunnel for an uninterrupted 55-hour period. However, Amtrak rarely takes advantage of this. In fact, reporting in the New York Daily News has found that over the last few years, only about once every three months – 13 times in a four-year period from mid-2017 to mid-2021 – has there been a full weekend repair job in one of the tunnels. Accelerated repairs would be able to reduce the costs of the fixes through greater efficiency, and, since American government budgeting is done in nominal dollars, a lower price level than in the mid-2030s.

It’s likely that such egregious examples also exist for the main project, the $14 billion new tunnels. I don’t know of any such example, and I don’t think it’s worthwhile stopping the project over this; but it’s important to remain vigilant and remember that while the tunnels are fully funded for all intents and purposes, a small gap remains and should be fillable without new money.

The benefits of the tunnels

The costs are very high. But what are the benefits?

In isolation, the benefits are that capacity across the Hudson would double. This would enable doubling commuter rail traffic. Before corona, the trains were very crowded, to the point of suppressing demand; ridership is lower now than it was then, but east of the Hudson, Metro-North is at 78% of pre-corona ridership and rising fast. Moreover, the prospects of future growth in commuting in New Jersey are better than those in suburban New York and Connecticut, since New Jersey permits housing at an almost healthy rate, 4 annual housing units per 1,000 people, whereas Long Island permits about 1, Westchester 2-3, and Fairfield County 1.5-2.5. There’s enough pressure in New Jersey even in the short term that a ridership flop like that of East Side Access is very unlikely.

That said, New Jersey Transit only had about 310,000 weekday riders in 2019, double-counting transfers (of which there aren’t many, unlike on the LIRR). Not many more than half those trips even originated or ended at Penn Station – one of the adaptations to overcrowding on New Jersey Transit is to send about half the trains from the Morris and Essex Lines to Hoboken, from which passengers take PATH into the city, and another is for passengers to get off at Newark and transfer to PATH there. Penn Station’s ridership in 2019 was 94,000 boardings, or 188,000 trips; that is the number that could potentially be doubled. So, $14 billion for 188,000 trips; this is $74,000 per rider, which is too high, and if that is the only benefit, then the project should be canceled.

However, the Hudson Tunnel Project interacts positively with every operational improvement in commuter rail. If off-peak frequencies are increased so that passengers can use the trains not just for rush hour commuting, then ridership will rise. Of course, peak frequency is not really relevant to off-peak ridership – but there are advantages from the new tunnels to off-peak service, such as more cleanly separating Northeast Corridor service from Morris and Essex service, improving reliability for both.

And then there are all the necessary small improvements, such as electrification. For example, right now, the Raritan Valley Line today is unelectrified, and passengers have to transfer at Newark to either PATH or a Northeast Corridor or North Jersey Coast Line train to Manhattan; only a handful of trains run to Manhattan using dual-mode locomotives, none at rush hour. The current service plan with the new tunnels is to run ever more trains with dual-mode locomotives, which are exceptionally expensive, heavy, and unreliable. However, the new tunnels interact positively with electrifying the Raritan Valley Line, currently the busiest diesel line in New Jersey, and with wiring short unelectrified tails on the North Jersey Coast and Morris and Essex Lines. These would raise both peak and off-peak ridership – and the extra capacity provided by the new tunnels improves the business case for them, even if the business case is healthy even purely on off-peak travel.

The same is true of platforms. The low platforms at most stations impede efficient boardings. They take too long at rush hour, and they’re inaccessible unless a conductor manually operates a wheelchair lift; conductors are not really cost-effective on commuter trains even at the wages of the 2020s, let alone those of the future. As with electrification, the case for converting all stations to high platforms for level boarding is strong even on off-peak ridership; the benefits are high and the costs are low (New Jersey Transit appears capable of raising platforms for $25 million per station). However, commuter rail managers and suburban politicians are squeamish and ignorant of best practices and only really get peak ridership; thus, the higher peak ridership expected from the new tunnels not only improves the already-strong business case for high platforms, but also makes this business case easier to explain to people who think that off-peak, everyone must drive.

With such improvements to speed and reliability – modern rolling stock (which none of the region’s agencies is interested in acquiring), electrification, high platforms, some junction fixes, and better timetabling (which the region will have to adopt for greater peak throughput) combine to a speed increase of a factor of about 1.5, with all the benefits that this entails.

Necessary efficiencies

Much of the benefit of the Hudson Tunnel Project comprises necessary improvements on the surface, some of which I expect to happen as ancillaries. But then there is also the issue of necessary efficiencies in New York.

The issue is that the current operating paradigm involves very long turns at Penn Station. LIRR trains terminate from the east and New Jersey Transit trains terminate from the west, and neither railroad turns trains especially quickly. The turn times are on the order of 20 minutes; mainline trains in the United States can reverse direction in service in 10 minutes when they need to (for example, if they’ve arrived late), and even eight minutes look possible, and outside the United States, constrained terminals like Tokyo Station on the Chuo Line or Catalunya on FGC do it much faster.

The relevance is that agency officials keep saying, falsely, that Penn Station Expansion is necessary for the full increase in capacity coming from the new tunnels. But they are not going to get the money for the expansion; it competes with so many other priorities for a pool of money, $30 billion for the entire Northeast Corridor, that is large compared to normal-world costs but small compared to American ones. This means that they’re going to have to make necessary efficiencies.

Through-running is one such efficiency. But there are others – chiefly, turning faster at terminals, since the new tunnels would mainly feed stub-end tracks. This, in turn, means better service in general, with lower operating costs and (if there’s through-running) better service for passengers.

On just a raw estimate of extra peak capacity, there just isn’t enough ridership to justify $14-16 billion in funding for new tunnels. But once all the necessary improvements and efficiencies come in, the benefit-cost analysis looks much healthier. It doesn’t mean anyone should be happy about the budget – agencies and area advocates should do what they can to make sure money is saved and the same budget can build more things (like all these necessary improvements) – but it could be more like the extremely high-cost and yet high-benefit Second Avenue Suwbay phase 1 and not like the failure that is East Side Access.

East Side Access opened in February, about four months ago, connecting the LIRR to Grand Central; previously, trains only went to Penn Station. The opening was not at all smooth – commuters mostly wanted to keep going to Penn Station, contrary to early-2000s projections, and stories of confused riders were common in local media. I held judgment at the time because big changes take time to show their benefits, but in the months since, ridership has not done well. On current statistics, it appears that the opening of the new tunnel to Grand Central has had no benefit at all, making this project not just the world leader in tunneling cost per kilometer (about $4 billion) but also one with no apparent transportation value.

What is East Side Access?

Traditionally, of New York’s two main train stations, Penn Station only served Amtrak, New Jersey Transit, and the LIRR, whereas Grand Central only served Metro-North. East Side Access is a tunnel from the LIRR Main Line to Grand Central, permitting trains to serve either of the two stations; an under-construction project called Penn Station Access likewise will permit one Metro-North line to serve Penn Station.

The tunnel across the East River was built in the 1970s and 80s together with the tunnel that now carries the F train; East Side Access was the project to build the connection from this tunnel to Grand Central as well as to the LIRR Main Line in Queens. The Grand Central connection does not lead to the preexisting Metro-North terminal with its tens of tracks, but to a deep cavern:

What was East Side Access supposed to serve?

Penn Station’s location is at the southwestern margin of the job concetration of Midtown Manhattan. Grand Central’s location is better; the studies done for the project 20 years ago found that for the majority of LIRR commuters, Grand Central was closer to their job than Penn Station. In 2019, there were 589,770 jobs within 1 km of Penn Station’s northeast corner at 7th and 33rd, of whom 48,460 lived on Long Island; within 1 km of Grand Central’s southern entrance at Park and 42nd, the corresponding numbers are 680,586 and 57,457.

Based on such analysis, the plan was to send as many trains as possible to Grand Central, at the expense of trains that used not to enter Manhattan at all but instead diverted to Downtown Brooklyn (within 1 km of Atlantic and Flatbush there were 41,360 jobs in 2019, of which 3,895 were held by Long Islanders). The central transfer point at Jamaica was reconfigured to no longer permit cross-platform transfers between Brooklyn- and Penn Station-bound trains in order to facilitate more direct trains to Grand Central.

The state promised large increases in both capacity and ridership; in 2022, joint Metro-North and LIRR head Catherine Rinaldi said they were increasing service by 40%. Unfortunately, ridership has flopped.

Ridership is a flop

The most recent publication about New York commuter rail ridership is from a week ago. LIRR ridership in May was about 5.6 million, with a peak of 229,000 passengers per weekday; ridership before corona was 316,000 per weekday. Metro-North, with no opening comparable to that of East Side Access, had 5.43 million riders in May with a peak of 215,000 passengers – but pre-corona ridership was 276,000. Metro-North has held up better the LIRR and recovered faster: May 2023 was 28% above May 2022, whereas for the LIRR, it was only 23%.

The same publication speaks of East Side Access positively – as it must, as an official report. It says the share of LIRR ridership is transitioning toward 65% Penn Station, 35% Grand Central. But this by itself already raises questions. The easier access to Grand Central and the extra capacity should have raised ridership; in the report, no surge is apparent since February of this year. Judging by the example of Metro-North, it appears that no net ridership has appeared as a result of the new project.

What’s going on here?

I’ve spent many years criticizing reverse-branching, in which a trunk line outside city center splits into branches in the core, in this case some trains serving Penn Station and others serving Grand Central. For East Side Access, my recommendation was to have one specific track pair, such as the express Main Line tracks, only carry trains to Grand Central, and the rest, such as the local tracks and Port Washington Branch tracks, only carry trains to Penn Station. The disappointing ridership of East Side Access has led some area transit advocates to criticize the MTA on the grounds that the problem is one of reverse-branching.

The media stories in late winter and early spring of confused commuters are certainly consistent with my criticism of reverse-branching. Everything that’s happened is consistent with that criticism, and yet I’m not certain that this is what’s going on. After all, East Side Access also adds new service and new capacity. Potentially, it’s about the loss of Jamaica transfers, but then which trains would people even want to transfer from?

The main mechanisms by which reverse-branching hurts ridership are that it makes schedule planning too complex and thereby reduces reliability, and that the frequency on each reverse-branch is reduced. LIRR scheduling is already extremely complex, with one-off express patterns and trains weaving around one another at rush hour; in 2015, I looked at some rush hour schedules and compared them with the rolling stock’s technical capabilities and found that even relative to the derated capabilities of the trains, the timetables are padded by 32% on the Main Line. (Metro-North seems comparably padded.) East Side Access would hardly make this much worse. The second mechanism is frequency – but at rush hour, frequency at each suburban station is decent, if not great.

But then, I can’t think of anything else that fits. The issue could not be some permanent decrease in commuting, or some permanent decrease in commuting to Grand Central specifically, since Metro-North ridership has recovered better and all trains there go to Grand Central. It could potentially be some force of habit inducing LIRR commuters to stay on the trains they’re familiar with, but then we should see gradual increase in ridership since opening and we’re not seeing that at any higher rate than at Metro-North.