MAKE PENN STATION GREAT AGAIN.

As long as we're indulging in April foolery, let's return to what has long been a nostalgic excursion for New Yorkers.  Here, for reference, is a photo gallery of the old station.  I've had reservations about putting the old Roman bath and Crystal palace great room and concourse back in place.  "It's probably too much to ask that when the current Madison Square Garden goes, the surviving structural members of the Roman Bath and the trainshed be used to put back a Roman Bath with benches and a proper trainshed."

Why?  All those grand spaces were for the benefit of long distance passengers, Pullman passengers bound for Florida or Chicago or Montreal or Bar Harbor, as well as parlor car passengers going lawyering in Philadelphia or rent-seeking in Washington.  New Jersey commuters had trains to Exchange Place in Jersey City, changing to the Hudson Tubes for Manhattan; and once upon a time, the "Gimbels passageway" connecting Penn Station to the Tubes at Herald Square was all Pennsylvania Railroad.  Long Island commuters had the Atlantic Avenue station in Brooklyn, change there for the BMT into Manhattan.  And the mind quails at the thought of somebody proposing to Alexander Cassatt or General Atterbury that Lackawanna electrics be brought into Penn Station using a connecting track at Secaucus!

THE MONUMENTS WE'VE DESTROYED.

Years ago, the editors at the New York Times described the "redevelopment" of New York's Pennsylvania Station as "a shameful act of vandalism."  Its replacement, the current editors assert, is a "calamity".

A vast steel, travertine and granite railway palace of the people, the old Pennsylvania Station had declined by the end into a symbol of bygone Gilded Age opulence. It was replaced by Penn Plaza and Madison Square Garden, Modernist mediocrities, erected to serve real estate interests, with a new subterranean Penn Station entombed below.

Some 600,000 commuters, riding Amtrak, Long Island Rail Road and New Jersey Transit, now suffer Penn Station every day. That makes it probably the busiest transit hub in the Western world, busier than Heathrow Airport in London, busier than Newark, La Guardia and Kennedy airports combined.

To pass through Grand Central Terminal, one of New York’s exalted public spaces, is an ennobling experience, a gift. To commute via the bowels of Penn Station, just a few blocks away, is a humiliation.

The Pennsylvania Station presented architects and engineers with a challenge, as trains arriving directly from the west (the New York Central made a virtue of its 140 mile detour to Albany to cross the Hudson as "The Water Level Route") would be some 40 feet below street level so as to get under the river and under the subways and sewer mains.  Thus, a lot of the station would be underground, even without the supposed benefit of building a sports arena upstairs.

But the only way to fix Penn properly is to move Madison Square Garden.

Why? Because the open secret about the Moynihan plan is that Amtrak alone would move across Eighth Avenue. Long Island Rail Road, New Jersey Transit and the subways wouldn’t budge. And only 30,000 of those 600,000 people who use Penn Station each day take Amtrak, never mind all the subway riders passing through.

That’s right: 95 percent of commuters will still have to contend with Penn even when the Moynihan plan is realized.

It’s true that the Moynihan plan will eventually improve a few access routes to subways and commuter trains. But it will add no new tracks and have limited effect on the congestion and misery of Penn Station. New tracks aside, the challenge is at the bare minimum to bring light and air into this underground purgatory and, beyond that, to create for millions of people a new space worthy of New York, a civic hub in the spirit of the great demolished one, more attuned to the city’s aspirations and democratic ideals.

We concur in part and dissent in part. It is true that at the time it opened, the station offered departing through passengers a vista reminiscent of a classical train shed, or a conservatory.

Pennsylvania Station, New York, as built.

What this illustration does not show is the shorter stairs for arriving passengers, who could make their way to street level or to the taxi stand without encountering the light and air.  Nor does it show the Long Island Rail Road platforms that extend to the north of 33d Street, accessible only by stairs from the same level as the arrival concourse.  A subsequent renovation of Penn Station separated New Jersey Transit passengers from Amtrak passengers by building new stairs and boarding gates in space that was left open in the original 1910 station footprint, and simply covered over as part of the creation of the sports arena and office tower.

The Times editors suggest it is time to undo the vandalism, by removing Madison Square Garden from the station site.  What intrigues is their impatience with the time "process" takes to get anything done in New York City.  (Next, somebody will be nostalgic for Robert Moses.  Don't get me started.)  This outlander notes only that Pennsylvania Station was about five years in the construction, and five years to redevelop.  The Empire State Building was less than five years in the construction.  And there's been a hole at Battery Park for the past ten years.

NOTES ON AN OLD TIMETABLE.

It has been a Cold Spring Shops tradition to agitate for faster train timings by drawing invidious comparisons of Amtrak schedules with those maintained by Depression-era steam railroads.

Image from Mike's Railway History.

The publisher of Harper's is inspired, upon riding Amtrak from New York to New Haven to view some art at Yale, to make a similar comparison.

I take the chronically mediocre, supposedly high-speed Acela fairly often to Boston, Providence and Washington; no one needs to tell me how much faster and better it could be. But to refresh my knowledge, I recently made a round trip to New Haven, just to remind myself of what we’ve lost and of the potential benefits if we took trains seriously again.

New York’s acoustic-tile-ceilinged, fluorescent-lit Penn Station remains what has to be among the worst, most dispiriting major transportation terminals in the world, though my latest visit, post-rush hour on a Thursday morning two weeks ago, was relatively painless. My ticket seller was cordial and patient in explaining the differences between a $76 round trip on the Northeast Regional and a $140 round trip on the Acela. Further, I learned from my ticket folder that May 12 is National Train Day.

Waiting under the train board for the track to be announced (there’s no space for benches), I was tempted to jump on the glamorous-sounding Silver Star to Miami, scheduled to leave at 11:02, two minutes after my Northeast Regional #172, but I stuck with my plan. Whatever the ugliness of Penn Station, I was happy to be spared the airport-security drill and even happier when my train lurched into motion exactly on time. The café car was staffed by a kindly soul, and my $4.75 fruit-and-granola yogurt parfait along with my $2 coffee made for an adequate meal. As we moved east, then north through Queens, over the spectacular Hell Gate Bridge, then across Randall’s Island and past the New York Post printing plant, I started to think that maybe “regular” Amtrak wasn’t so bad, even when it bumps along at 50 to 60 mph.

On the advice of my editor, I had invented an itinerary, including a quick tour of the Yale University Art Gallery, so I began to watch the clock very closely. Only if the train were on schedule could I see some paintings and catch the returning Acela to New York to make a 4 p.m. appointment. The train arrived right on time at the hollowed-out wreck known as Bridgeport, then four minutes early, at 12:34, at New Haven (Paris by comparison to Bridgeport), whose handsome beaux-arts, Cass Gilbert-designed Union Station puts New York City’s hideous 1960s Pennsylvania Station to shame. Ten minutes later I was admiring Thomas Eakins’s “Taking the Count,” after marveling at Van Gogh’s “Café de Nuit,” Trumbull’s “Washington at Trenton” and Bonnard’s “Place Pigalle at Night.”

A great university gets the art, the romance and the train station it deserves. Why not the trains and speed to match?

Returning to Amtrak blandness on the frigid westbound platform, I was pleased to observe a crew pre-emptively de-icing the eastbound platform with liquid calcium chloride, in anticipation of the coming blizzard. Still, what’s the point of the Acela and the extra $32? It couldn’t be my $8 “Tuscan Panini,” which turned into a soggy mess after microwaving. True, I skipped Bridgeport in a bit of class-conscious scheduling. But my front-end-of-the train coach car made a squeaking sound every time that we jerked a little and at 2:10 a last call was announced in the café because of a “scheduled break,” even though we weren’t due into New York for another half hour. Shabbiness, thy name is Amtrak.

My Acela did arrive on time (one of 85.4 percent such rides in the past 12 months), but so what? While the train briefly hits 150 mph north of New York, it averages somewhere in the 70s range between Manhattan and Bos-ton because the tracks can’t handle anything faster. The telling comparison is not with the Northeast Regional but with Metro North’s New Haven Line commuter train out of gorgeous Grand Central that takes the more direct route through upper Manhattan to New Haven. The 10:03 Acela takes 1 hour 27 minutes to reach New Haven, for $70. The off-peak 10:07 Metro North takes just 33 minutes longer and costs $22. Shocked? Not enough. In 1963, when New York’s magnificent old Penn Station was demolished, the New York, New Haven and Hartford Railroad ran its fastest train from New York’s Grand Central to New Haven in 1 hour 20 minutes, seven minutes faster than the present-day Acela!

Yes, once upon a time a New Yorker could make a midday trip to New Haven and return on the Yankee Clipper, with a dining car that would put the Acela cuisine to shame.   Or one could return later in the evening on the Merchants Limited.

HUMILIATING AND BEWILDERING.

New York Times writer Michael Kimmelman laments, "When the Old Penn Station Was Demolished, New York Lost Its Faith."  That might not be accurate, although New York clearly lost something then.

It's interesting how what looked like Progress and Uplift doesn't age well.  "Then, a lot of bad Modern architecture, amid other signs of postwar decline, flipped the optimistic narrative."

In the era of tailfins, jet aircraft without security zones, and what looked like cheap motor fuel, perhaps, though, the passenger railroads hadn't aged well either.

On top of which, as Ada Louise Huxtable, the former Times architecture critic, wrote in 1966: “Functionally, the station was considerably less than noble. The complexity and ambiguity of its train levels and entrances and exits were a constant frustration.” Except for its glass-and-iron waiting room, she added, the station “was a better expression of ancient Rome than of 20th-century America.”

So it wasn’t altogether shocking when railroad executives offered the air rights for the property for $50 million (nearly ten times that amount in today’s dollars). New York could downsize its station, stick it underground, add a new sports arena and office tower on top and reboot itself for the rest of the century. To pragmatists, that sounded like progress.

The Pennsylvania Railroad's thinking, both in New York and in Chicago, was that there wasn't going to be much long-distance passenger train travel, and a scaled-down station would be sufficient for those few commuters who wouldn't appreciate the Long Island Expressway or the Congress Street Expressway.

That's not what transpired.

Conceived to handle fewer than 200,000 passengers, the replacement Penn Station is today the busiest transit hub in the Western Hemisphere, through which more than 600,000 commuters pass each day — an experience as humiliating and bewildering as Grand Central remains inspiring and exalted.

In part, that conception was of The Pennsylvania Station as purely an intercity station. The North Jersey Coast local that once left at a quarter to four would originate at Exchange Place, with commuters riding a ferry or the Tubes either to Wall Street or to Midtown.  It's still possible to commute that way, board the Tubes under Macy's and ride to Newark for either the old Pennsylvania or Erie or Lackawanna services or even to pick up an Acela.  It's more convenient for riders, though, to bring as many of the suburban trains as the North River Tunnel can handle into Penn Station, including the through-routed trains via Seacaucus.  In addition, a century of accumulating Federal functions in Washington produces many more riders on the New York Division, er, the Northeast Corridor.

What might be more to the point is that the redeveloped Penn Station of today is serving more passengers on a regular basis than the original station did on the busiest days of World War II.

JUST PUT IT BACK THE WAY IT WAS.

New York's Pennsylvania Station, that is.

At the time the original station opened, a New York pundit complained that, with the ability to run trains under both rivers, midtown Manhattan was merely a way station between Iselin and Speonk.  (The Hell Gate Bridge line, making today's Acela service possible, opened later.)

Through-routing of commuter trains from the Long Island Rail Road to The Pennsylvania Railroad makes sense.

Rebuild Penn Station has supported a plan by Jim Venturi of ReThinkNYC to make Penn a through station instead of the last stop for New Jersey Transit and Long Island Railroad trains. Trains would no longer be “going back empty,” [Rebuild Penn Station helmsman and Fordham graduate Samuel] Turvey says. “Think of the subway: If the subway came down from the Bronx, stopped at 42nd Street, and went back empty, how much waste is that?”

Context: subway trains from the Bronx run through Manhattan and turn back in Brooklyn. They might rack up some empty mileage at peak hours.  On the other hand, through-routing Philadelphia's suburban trains seems to have worked pretty well.  As far as the Long Island being a third-rail D.C. operation, and The Pennsylvania Railroad and the Lackawanna being overhead catenary on A.C., well, the New Haven wrote the book on ambidextrous multiple unit cars running out of Grand Central Terminal, a trick that they started in the early 1900s and they went so far as to order dual-mode F units capable of running as straight electrics in the Park Avenue tunnel.

Imagine, though, arriving in Manhattan on the Acela or the Northeast Regional or the North Jersey Coast local to see this.

Jeff Stikeman rendering for Rebuild Penn Station, retrieved from Fordham Magazine.

Presumably, the North Jersey Coast local that leaves The Pennsylvania Station at a quarter to four would again be identified with train gates in this fashion.

First, though, that sports arena above the concourse has to go.  Somehow, Boston's North Station works despite having an arena over-top, but the folks who redeveloped Penn Station ran additional support columns through the concourse area, same mistake as at Chicago.

Turvey knows the old Penn Station from books, photos, and Hollywood films. On a recent stroll through the current station, he pointed out some glimpses of its past: a cast-iron partition here, a brass and iron railing there, some glass-block tiles that were designed to allow natural light to reach lower levels but now bear fixtures for fluorescent bulbs. “Dreams die hard for me,” he admits. But he denies that he’s guided solely by nostalgia, and insists that classical tastes and innovation can go together, citing Grand Central Terminal and Washington, D.C.’s Union Station as examples.

“There’s a strain in the architecture community that doesn’t like the idea of rebuilding old buildings,” he says. But he points to recent examples of architectural reconstruction, like Moscow’s 19th-century Cathedral of Christ the Savior, which was torn down on Joseph Stalin’s orders in 1931 and rebuilt in the 1990s. And he argues that Penn Station could be rebuilt on the existing foundations “using modern, more cost-effective construction techniques with appropriate upgrades for expanding train and pedestrian traffic.”

The estimated cost, he says, would be between $3 billion and $3.5 billion.

I have reservations about the Washington rebuild, involving the commercial area and the passenger services commingled, something Chicago Union Station fixed twenty years ago by moving the food court upstairs, although that space is dangerous during the commuter rush.

That noted, as long as we're in a "Make America Great Again" mood, putting New York's Pennsylvania Station on the list of projects in that spirit is a good thing.

TODAY'S RAILROAD REMINISCENCE.

New York Central's W. L. Gwyer recalls a trip from headquarters to check on the Boston and Albany.

In 1967 I was in New York Central’s management-training program under the supervision of R. D. Timpany. This was the dawn of the computer era in the railroad industry, a direction firmly embraced by the NYC (President Alfred E. Perlman even created a Vice President of Cybernetics position before 99 percent of the world and 99.9 percent of the New York Central even knew what the term meant), and we were installing a computer-based payroll system for the Maintenance of Way, Mechanical, and Signal departments. We trainees were drafted to help educate supervisors on how the new system worked, and this meant travel from headquarters in New York City all over the railroad. One of my assignments was Boston.

At the time, public travel options between New York and Boston included flying, a bus, or the New Haven Railroad either via Springfield, Mass. — the long way around — or the main line through New London, Connecticut, and Providence, Rhode Island. I chose the latter option, although I’m sure my boss would have preferred otherwise, as passenger trains were a dirty word on the NYC. Nevertheless, I booked passage on the Owl.

The railroads had recently instituted something called the Home Road Pass Plan in a move to get rid of the pass department and its associated paperwork. Under that system, all one did was show his pass to the foreign-road ticket agent and you got half fare. As I recall, the New Haven was a signatory to the pact. So, on the appointed evening, I presented myself, pass in hand, to a ticket agent at Grand Central and paid for a lower berth to Boston. The fare came to $20.78 (in a coach it was $15.39).

In the heyday of the 20th Century Limited and trans-Atlantic liners, it was chic to have dinner in Manhattan, drinks at the Oyster Bar in Grand Central, and proceed to your accommodations. But by 1967 the Century as well as the greyhounds of the sea were on their way to Valhalla. All was not lost, however, as the Oyster Bar and the Owl remained — smoldering embers of a different age. Not wishing to offend the gods of the high iron, I headed for the Oyster Bar to celebrate my impending New Haven adventure — after all, it was a road that I had never ridden, and the NYC was footing the bill. About 11 p.m. I walked to the gate, which still announced the Owl in the grand manner, just as in the Trains photo. The sleepers were open at 10 p.m. and the train left at 12:40 a.m. Arrival at Boston’s South Station was at 6:50 a.m., but you could stay aboard until 8.

The Oyster Bar is still there, although there are fewer high-roller commuters headed for Scarsdale or Danbury these days.  The Owl didn't quite survive Penn Central, although apparently for a while there was a setout sleeper for New York passengers.

My employer merged with the Pennsylvania Railroad in February 1968. As a condition of the merger, Penn Central was forced to absorb the New Haven, which it did in January 1969. The Owl came off the following month. One could still book a sleeper between New York and Boston, but the car was handled both ways by PC’s Federal, a through train to/from Washington that operated via Penn Station.

[Dispatcher with BNSF Henry Frick] had his Owl memories too. He rode the train in September 1968 from Grand Central to Boston in a bedroom, also in a Beach car. He told me he saw the Owl the last week it operated: just one FL9 locomotive and three forlorn cars.

Amtrak never reinstated overnight New York-Boston service as such. It did run a Boston-Washington sleeper on a train called the Night Owl, which appeared in the November 1972 timetable and was more a reincarnation of the Federal, not the Owl. Indeed, its Gotham times were not conducive to the overnight New York-Boston market, as it left Penn Station in the wee hours in both directions. I had occasion to ride it several times while in the employ of Amtrak, but the ambience and romance of the old New Haven was missing. It just was not the same.

Under Amtrak auspices, the Night Owl ran under some different names, and the current service runs between Boston and Newport News, but with no sleeping cars. Amtrak officialdom keep talking about adding sleeping cars once the latest fleet of Viewliners hits the rails, but so far that hasn't happened.

MAKE THE PENNSYLVANIA STATION GREAT AGAIN.

This summer, City Journal arts maven Catesby Leigh suggested that the best way to improve the rabbit warren under Madison Square Garden that calls itself Penn Station would be to ... restore The Pennsylvania Station.  The article starts with some necessary background.

In 1961, a mere half-century after Charles Follen McKim’s Pennsylvania Station opened, the once-mighty but now financially moribund Pennsylvania Railroad cut a deal with a private developer that led to its demolition, completed five years later.

The result was the worst trade-off in American architectural history, one that would make historic preservation a popular cause. The grandeur of the old station’s interior—never entirely effaced by the postwar invasion of advertising signage and displays of the latest-model automobiles, not to mention the crazy space-age ticket counter that somehow landed in the waiting room—was supplanted by a glassy office-tower slab, 2 Penn Plaza, and the cylindrical pile of Madison Square Garden. Each weekday, 650,000 people make their way through the entrails of this dystopian complex—“mashed,” just as Progressive Architecture magazine forewarned after the destruction of McKim’s station got under way, “into subterranean passageways like ancient Christians.”

Focus on that 650,000 people. With the commuter traffic, that may be upwards of 300,000 distinct individuals each day, most of them dashing from or to their trains.  By contrast, during the second World War, the records for passenger loadings were around 400,000 tickets lifted by conductors on departing trains.  To provide additional space for servicemen to wait, The Pennsylvania Railroad built floors at the arrival concourse level in the open parts of the train hall.  The east end of the train hall looked like this on a busy day.

New York Pennsylvania Station, July 1944
Life Google Images via The Bowery Boys.

Before the War, there was a clear space above the tracks beyond the west gates.

Pennsylvania Station, New York, as built.

Yes, we've been following these plans to expand the station, or adaptively reuse the post office to the west, or dial PEnnsylvania 6-5000 to book a room, or something, for some time.

But moving the Garden to the Post Office site, or perhaps locating it above the coach yard, and building a railroad station that looks like a railroad station intrigues.

The Garden really does need to move—and building the new one within Farley’s capacious masonry envelope is an attractive option—because Penn Station needs to expand vertically to be a station worthy of New York City. Reconstruction of McKim’s station is the best way for that to happen. It is far from certain that a new annex across 31st Street from the existing station will be needed to handle additional rail traffic from a new Hudson railway tunnel, as Amtrak contends. To be constructed over the next two decades, the new tunnel is the centerpiece of Amtrak’s big-ticket Gateway Program, which includes construction of this Penn South annex to accommodate seven new underground tracks.

More intriguing, however (as well as technically more challenging) is a possibility to widen the platforms while providing fewer tracks by through-routing Long Island and New Jersey Transit commuter trains. That's one way to conserve on coach yards, as the rush-hour trains might tie up during the day at yards that are generally full only at night. But the Long Island is 600 volt third-rail direct current, the former Pennsylvania and Lackawanna electrified lines in New Jersey use overhead wire energized with kilovolts of alternating current. Will the good people of Long Island accede to overhead wires?

But the idea is gaining some traction, fittingly, in conservative circles, with American Conservative executive editor Lewis McCrary offering a qualified endorsement.  The article links to other manifestations of the same proposal.

Now, if we can talk about an improved Pennsylvania Station, can we talk about multiple train frequencies to Pittsburgh with overnight services for and from Chicago and St. Louis?

A GIANT STAGE SET. New York's Pennsylvania Stations comprises three stories although I'll treat it as a single Book Review N^o. 5. The first story, about the construction and "redevelopment" of the 1910 station, surveys much of the same material as Conquering Gotham, reviewed here, albeit from the perspective of an art historian. Thus there's less of the political machinations or lifestyles of the rich and famous than in Conquering Gotham, and more on the architectural influences (Roman ruins, Frankfurt (M), the colonnade at St. Peter's in Rome, the Gare d'Orsay.) The reader who wants train pictures and track plans will find none: those are in Manhattan Gateway and the sources referenced therein. The first chapter will help someone not conversant with architectural forms or engineering understand some of the odd features of the station. From the outside, the trainshed looked a bit clunky, but that was required in order to make the arches imitate Roman vaulting when viewed from the inside. The simpler solution would have been additional horizontal bracing inside. The floor plan had in my view a lot of wasted space (some of which lasted into the modern era where New Jersey Transit was able to add a new set of gates east of the diminished waiting room and south of the old entrance arcade) that principal architect Charles McKim envisioned to provide the well-to-do with a suitably grand passage to a de luxe train that did not involve descending fifty feet all in one go. Mr McKim would probably be disappointed that the bulk of the station's clientele has always been middle-class commuters (Westchester and western Connecticut are the east coast version of Lake Forest and Winnetka, reached from Grand Central) and the de luxe trade quickly decamped to the airliners. He might have been more favorably disposed to the Acela Express, which offers only "businessclass" and "first." That wasted space was for baggage rooms.

The chapter gets into some of the difficulties of adapting classical forms to a railroad station. Thus passengers get a waiting room with more interior space than the nave of a major cathedral and fewer pews than a Russian Orthodox village church, and carriage drives that one might expect the Prussian Guard to goose-step under. But, as David P. Morgan (of Trains) once noted, Philadelphia's Thirtieth Street Station (a Pennsylvania design) was newer than Cincinnati's Union Station (a New York Central design) but it looked older and it aged better. The attempts to make New York's Pennsylvania Station look newer only made the public less interested in preserving it. And so the upper works went. Perhaps the absence of an office tower in the upper works made it more likely to go, although the pattern of big-city station redevelopments strikes me as a barometer of Rust Belt economics. Call the roll: New York Penn: office tower and (now obsolete) sports center above. New York Grand Central: Pan Am (or whatever it now is) above, great room saved with the intervention of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis and other worthies. (The World Trade Center replaced an earlier office tower over the Tube terminal near Battery Park.) Philadelphia Broad: replaced with office tower and suburban station. Philadelphia 30th: too far from city center to redevelop. Pittsburgh Pennsylvania and P&LE: both with office towers, office towers now put to other uses. Buffalo Central: despite having an office tower, empty? Detroit Michigan Central: despite having an office tower, empty. Cleveland: office tower above rapid-transit station, the one or two passenger trains call at a lakefront station. Cincinnati: a profligate waste of space with little alternate use. Chicago: existing office block above the Roman bath waiting room at Union Station being coveted for other use; concourse building replaced by office towers, as is also the case at North Western, LaSalle Street, Central, and Randolph Street. (The Dearborn headhouse is listed, and the Grand Central site is cut off from the Loop by Congress Street, which is effectively an expressway almost to State Street.)

The middle chapter is a photo essay on the removal of the upper works. It makes a useful companion to The Destruction of Penn Station. The middle chapter of Stations describes what we're seeing, but not the dates the pictures are taken. Destruction has dates, but not descriptions of what we're seeing. Taken together, a reader can piece together the civil-engineering puzzle that taking down a building while it is still in use is. That's also why we have pictures: when the demolition crews marked off at evenings or weekends, the station remained open to traffic, and several photographers explored the notionally closed parts of the station, sometimes at risks that no contractor's insurer would want trespassers to take these days. The chapter also suggests that some of the offices in the wings that surrounded the public areas of the station remained in use in early stages of demolition. The photographic record revealed something that surprised many people: that Roman Bath waiting room was plaster castings on a steel frame: apart from some column bases, there was no marble or granite or load-bearing stone at all. (I wonder if that's true in Chicago?)

The third chapter is an anticipation of the new New York station, to be built in areas of the Post Office that aren't well suited to current postal operations. I hold off on reviewing that chapter too closely as there's some doubt about that project being completed. (It's probably too much to ask that when the current Madison Square Garden goes, the surviving structural members of the Roman Bath and the trainshed be used to put back a Roman Bath with benches and a proper trainshed). Some of the details of the project are incomplete: there already is a Long Island concourse west of Eighth Avenue, and the current Amtrak loading gates are the 1910 infrastructure, and there are those New Jersey Transit gates in the site of the old southeast baggage court and it's not clear if those will be retained or not.

(Cross-posted at Fifty Book Challenge.)

LEAD US NOT INTO PENN STATION, BUT DELIVER US FROM WISE EXPERTS.

Brown University public policy researcher Marc J. Dunkelman offers a lengthy analysis of all the ways in which New York's Pennsylvania Station was ruined and yet cannot be put back together.

Penn Station is the second most heavily trafficked transit hub in the world, trailing only Tokyo’s Shinjuku Station. The station serves more daily passengers than the region’s three huge airports (Kennedy, LaGuardia, and Newark) combined. More people pass through Penn each weekday than live in the city of Baltimore. Anyone who has passed through Penn Station over the past half-century—or who passed through it this Thanksgiving weekend—knows that the nation’s busiest transit center is a national embarrassment, a hole in the ground where the food is ratty and the waiting rooms are sparse.

For more than a generation, New York’s most important gateway has been a grimy relic. Powerful figures in New York, Albany and Washington have plotted for more than three decades to redevelop the whole complex into a world-class facility. But time and again, their efforts have faltered. Today, after 30 years of talk, the station is poised for an upgrade, but the plans are less elaborate than the ones that were announced last decade. And even when the current work is complete, the station will require still more renovation just to be considered a modern facility.

There's a lot to digest in the article, it comes down to the absence of anyone with the vision of Alexander J. Cassatt and the drive of J. Edgar Thomson. "But Penn Station has actually languished at the hands of another simple reality: No one has the leverage to fix it. "  It's another inheritance from the truly most destructive generation of the modern era, the process-worshippers of the Silent Generation.  "Since the 1970s, even as progressives have championed Big Government, they’ve worked tirelessly to put new checks on its power—to pull it away from imperious technocrats who might use government to bulldoze hapless communities. "  It's enough to make a Marxist giggle (a phrase that I lifted from Trains editor David P. Morgan, who noted the rigamarole strangling Commuter Rail service in New York in the late 1950s.)

Mr Dunkelman is still a believer in the power of Governance by Wise Experts.  "To rebuild faith in the power of government to do good, responsible leaders need the power to pursue the public interest."  I fear, though, that he has really made the case that the best thing for the Wise Experts to do is to go away.

LEAD US BACK INTO PENN STATION.

And deliver us from evil.  The New York Times reports that an ambitious plan to provide more passenger amenities in The Pennsylvania Station was a casualty of the financial crash of 2008.

Both the old Penn Station and the post office building were designed by the same firm — McKim, Mead & White.

But the development partners had a far more ambitious, $14 billion plan in mind. They sought to demolish Madison Square Garden, which sits over Penn Station, and build a new arena for the Knicks and Rangers inside the post office. With the Garden gone, they planned to overhaul Penn Station, erecting a glass-enclosed train hall, along with department stores and, nearby, office and residential buildings.

The complicated plan collapsed in 2008 because of the recession.

That plan probably had some support from Times management, which went on record recently as favoring the removal of Madison Square Garden from above the station.

Whether the new train hall would have the grandeur of the original remains to be seen.

Pennsylvania Station, New York, as built.

They also exhibit frustration with what passes for process in New York, in light of the new plan to move some community college facilities into the old post office building, and build some kind of additional waiting and ticketing facilities on the Eighth Avenue side.

“We do need to get going on this station,” said Robert Yaro, president of the Regional Plan Association, a civic advocacy group. “I’d like to see something exceptional done there.”

The long delay on the Moynihan project is typical of large, complicated redevelopment efforts involving partnerships between private developers and government, like Battery Park City, Hudson Yards or the rejuvenation of Times Square. The projects can languish through the ebb and flow of the economy, legal challenges and changes in Albany or at City Hall.

Last December, I had this to say about procedural delays.

This outlander notes only that Pennsylvania Station was about five years in the construction, and five years to redevelop. The Empire State Building was less than five years in the construction.

The hole at Battery Park is being filled in, but only slowly.

UNDOING VANDALISM. James Lileks notes that New York City has committed to rebuilding the Farley Post Office Building as a new Pennsylvania Station.

The sin of the demolition of the old Penn Station was never erased, and the wretched piss-soaked warren they put in its place was a constant reminder of the Original Sin of post-war urbanists. That unholy combo of bottom-liners and utopians took away one of the most magnificent spaces in urban American and replaced it with something that seemed lifted en masse from a claustrophobic dream. To modern eyes it makes no sense: the era where social divisions were keenly felt gave us a space so vast that all distinctions dissolved in its great stone heaven; the egalitarians, by contrast, gave us a space whose equalizing impulse was best expressed as the desire to oppress everyone’s spirit. I usually cooled my heels in the Amtrak First Class club, which was a parody of a sham of a travesty of First Class, at least in the 90s. You got a scratchy seat and a battered magazine and translucent coffee. If I didn’t have a first class ticket I went to the bar on the north side of the room, where you could smoke. It stank. Aside from rush hour, it was empty, and had a sad battered quality that made you feel like a rude sack of meat slumped over a ration of intoxicants. And I never knew which track I should take. It never seemed clear. Even though they had signs and names it always seemed as though they were leaving out some key detail. Like your destination. No, I hate Penn Station.

The tribute to the old station includes one of my favorite quotes, this from the editorial board of the New York Times.

We want and deserve tin-can architecture in a tinhorn culture. And we will probably be judged not by the monuments we build but by those we have destroyed.

That pretty well applies to many of the other monuments of the America of that era, the America that worked, including the universities.

But enough of that. Consider Mr Lileks's tribute to train travel.

Penn Station had one thing going for it. Trains. Nothing compares to arriving by train; you’re not dropped off in a climate-controlled center on the edge of town, but dropped in the humid middle, surrounded by machinery and steam and shouts and clangs. You don’t slide up the jetway – you schlep yourself along the platform to the stairs, you jostle and maneuver and find your place in the throng; you thread through the station, head outside – and oh, my, GOD, there it is, loud and wide and high and alive, the city.

Yes, and throughout the rebuildings of the visible spaces of Penn Station, the one constant has been the trains and the tracks. Apart from the connections to a west side coach yard and a New York Central freight line to bring all Amtrak trains into Penn, the track is as The Pennsylvania Railroad conceived it in 1910.

When you leave you leave with the nudge. Planes waddle to the runway then throw themselves in the air with theatrical fury. Trains nudge you out. You’re sitting in your seat; you’re still. The strange orange subterranean light fills the car; again the shouts, the clangs, the whistles, the whirr of electric carts. The doors huff shut. Conductors walk around listening to crackly voices on the walkie-talkie. You wait. Then the nudge. The train lurches forward, the wheels clank, the rhythm begins, and you’re on your way. In a few minutes you’ll clear the tunnels and see the city from below, indifferent to your departure. Clank clank clank clank clank clank clank clank. On the plane you seem to approach New York like a nest of hornets – you’re wary, circling, then you bore in. When you leave by train you simply move along, move down, move out. Old tunnels, old concrete, rusted remains, barrels, trash, then light.

And speed.

GETTING THE OBJECTIVES RIGHT. Megan McArdle is taking requests, including "Why does [passenger] rail suck?" Some of her post focuses on the government's schizophrenic role in funding on the one hand and doing environmental protection on the other hand, and there is a followup on the peculiarities of fully allocated cost accounting as well as a response to Chris Lawrence weighing the costs and benefits of a less dirigiste structure for government. Vermont Tiger's Geoffrey Norman offers a less cheerful view of public servants.

When the Chris Dodds of the world are running the railroads, they'll get sleepers and eat off good china in the dining car.

The rest of us will be packed into boxcars and eating stale bread.

That's not far from the perception many Midwesterners have of Acela Expresses for Boswash and standing-room-only three car Horizon rakes in Illinois and Indiana.

But it's a response to the lead-in to Chris Lawrence's post inviting me to weigh in that I'll work on here. Consider the example Ms McArdle uses to introduce the procedural thicket.

Why isn't there a high speed train from New York to Chicago? Well, first of all, this would greatly anger legislators from New York and Michigan, who like the fact that the Chicago train must pass through Buffalo and Detroit, even if this assures that almost no one with a job will actually use it.

She rules out partial privatization of Amtrak.

Amtrak can't be even partially privatised, because then who would run trains from New York through Buffalo and Detroit to Chicago in a speedy eighteen hours?

Here's why the objective of the rail system matters. At one time, The Pennsylvania Railroad and the New York Central reached New York from Chicago in sixteen hours (for one brief shining moment, in 15:30) with steam power. (The Pennsylvania had the more direct route, but east of Pittsburgh comes The Mountain, while New York Central used Lake Erie and the Mohawk and Hudson Rivers to run a longer distance at a faster speed.)

Going the great way around struck some railroad promoters as silly, particularly because that New York Central train headed west by way of Albany, which left the passenger at a greater air distance from Chicago than he or she was at Grand Central Terminal.

Thus, the figure of merit for a genuine high-speed train service linking Chicago and New York begins at ten hours.

Promotional poster image from Mary MacLane's Air Line historical photos. Click to enlarge.

If your objective is to provide a high-speed rail line that permits ten-hour timings, your railroad will be an undertaking of Biblical proportions. Ev'ry valley shall be exalted, every hill made low, the crooked straight, and the rough places plain.

Air Line proposal map from Mary MacLane's Air Line historical photos. Click to enlarge.

On the other hand, that's only a 90 mph railroad. Upgrade it for field-shunted Electroliners and you're in New York about 7 1/2 hours after you've left Chicago, and if you give it the fourth-generation Electroliner treatment and you can have your coffee in New York and meet a client for lunch in Chicago. On the other hand, you've laid out a railroad that misses the intervening cities, precisely the problem that would prevent politicians in those cities from committing public monies to be treated as a third-rail equivalent of flyover country.

(A historical note before I get back to the objectives: there really was an attempt to build the Chicago-New York Electric Air Line, which rather cheekily advertised its initial service between Gary and La Porte, Indiana. The aforementioned Mary MacLane has assembled a comprehensive Air Line website, including a page of contemporary images of its ruins. La Porte County in Indiana is home to two historical associations that include Air Line material on their websites.)

The problem of blending long-distance and short-haul corridor services has long challenged railroads. Those sixteen-hour flyers tended to be overnight sleeping car trains that called at Pittsburgh or Buffalo at times used by the military to begin invasions, and New York Central's Twentieth Century Limited, perhaps the most famous of the flyers, rolled through Cleveland without stopping. In the year or so leading up to the Penn Central merger, New York Central conducted a speed test with a jet-assisted rail diesel car, announced its plans to restructure its passenger train service, discontinued the Twentieth Century Limited, and introduced a memory-pattern service between Buffalo and Grand Central Terminal. No other corridors were set up at that time. The Pennsylvania Railroad discontinued the Broadway Limited and renamed the General as the Broadway Limited. After the merger, the resulting railroad was too overwhelmed with other problems to be able to set up promising corridors such as Pittsburgh-Cleveland-Detroit, Pittsburgh-Columbus-Indianapolis-St. Louis, Cincinnati-Indianapolis-Chicago, or Cleveland-Columbus-Cincinnati. A Trains speed survey of the era noted that those cities would have merited Trans-Europ Express service, the precursor to the TGV and ICE and Eurostar and Great North Eastern. Even with the skimpy offerings, the Penn Central timetables offered more frequent New-York Chicago services over more routes (via Pittsburgh on The Pennsylvania Railroad, via St. Thomas and Detroit west of Buffalo on the Michigan Central, and via Cleveland and Toledo on the Lake Shore and Michigan Southern). The grubby day trains that remained in Ohio and Indiana all died before Amtrak, although the memory pattern service east of Buffalo persists under the same Empire Service label.

And thus the problem facing people who wish to expand Amtrak. That north central corridor service in the region west of Pittsburgh and Buffalo and east of St. Louis and Chicago would be a very different service from one predicated on longer distance high-speed service, such as Denver-Chicago (doable dawn to dusk with existing technology) or Chicago-New York. But perhaps people who wish to expand the passenger rail network as a way of coping with (permanently?) higher gasoline prices would do well to study old timetables. Thanks to that Vermont Tiger post, we discover editorialists at The Brattleboro Reformer doing just that.

It's 1938 and you want to take a weekday trip from Brattleboro to New York City. A glance at the Boston and Maine Railroad's turntable shows six trains to choose from.

The Washingtonian, the top overnight train run jointly by the Central Vermont, Boston and Maine, New Haven and Pennsylvania railroads between Montreal and Washington, D.C., leaves Brattleboro at 3:30 a.m. and arrives at Penn Station at 8:12 a.m.

If you're not that much of an early riser, Train 74, the Connecticut Yankee, leaves Brattleboro at 4:35 a.m. and gets you to Grand Central Terminal by 9:45 a.m. -- the quickest train to the city. Or you could catch Train 78, which leaves Brattleboro at 5:52 a.m. and arrives at Grand Central at 11:40 a.m.

If you're sleeping in ...

They conclude,"There is no reason for rail service to be worse today than it was in 1938." That was a very good year. The Milwaukee Road introduced the world's fastest steam locomotives. But perhaps there are good reasons for the rail service to change (somehow the Boston and Maine enlarging Hoosac Tunnel for double-stacks, which hadn't yet been invented, strikes me as an improvement in rail service.) All the same, the renewed focus on passenger rail is reason for advocates and policy makers to review the best practices, and the errors, of the late steam era.

MAKE PENN STATION GREAT AGAIN?

The Federalist's Kyle Sammin brings politics through the North River tunnels.  "Reconstructing New York’s Penn Station in its original grandeur could be just the thing to reinvigorate conservatism in America’s cities and suburbs."

He starts with the tunnels.

One big expense is the North River tunnels. Opened in 1908, these tunnels built by the Pennsylvania Railroad connect New York with New Jersey and are the way into the city for Amtrak and New Jersey Transit trains. Their capacity of 24 trains per hour is maxed out, and has been for years.

They are also nearing the end of their useful life. Without new tunnels being built, the existing tubes would need to be closed one at a time to be overhauled, cutting traffic in half at a time it should really be doubled. The situation would never be tolerated if the river-crossing in question were an interstate highway bridge.

The plan to double the tunnels’ capacity is very costly, and became a political football at the state and federal levels. The latest incarnation, called the Gateway Program, is predicted to cost nearly $15 billion.

Have we really been wrangling about these tunnels for almost a decade?

When those dashing commuters and incela rent-seekers get off the train, though, what greets them is not pretty.

New York spent $4 billion on the new World Trade Center subway station that opened in 2016, double the original planned cost. Penn Station’s projected costs are comparable.

So even if we treat that estimate skeptically and assume it doubles like other station’s costs did, it is still $6 or $7 billion for a station used by 600,000 passengers a day, compared to $4 billion for one used by just 46,000 a day. With the federal government scheduled to spend more than $4 trillion this year, even picking up the entire cost of the station in one year would result in it costing less than 0.2 percent of the federal budget. Sharing costs with the states and city and spreading it out over the years of construction reduces that figure even more.

Those who backed Trump for president tend to be fairly comfortable with federal spending and do not fixate on ideological distinctions between infrastructure for trains and infrastructure for cars. They look back fondly, as do many non-Trump voters, on a time when America built great things. The transcontinental railroads, the Hoover Dam, and Apollo space program all inspired Americans and showcased our national triumph.

The idea that we should make America great again inspired a lot of voters in 2016. That promise is not fulfilled by tax cuts—as welcome as they were—nor by tweaks to entitlement programs, however much those may be needed. Greatness is in what we do, not in what we cut.

Because I'm thinking about running transportation capital as if by a multidivisional firm, I'm more sympathetic to arguments that an improved Pennsylvania Station (complete with four tracks for passenger trains from Philadelphia all the way to New Haven) if bundled with more sensible pricing of the turnpikes, tunnels and bridges that also serve Manhattan; and it occurs to me that a station and associated tunnels are a capital investment, that is to say, an asset generating a stream of income for which a portfolio of government bonds makes sense.  We don't have to use railroad-style betterment accounting, which what that "picking up the cost of the station in one year" is.

It doesn't make sense for a station that was jammed during the Christmas holidays of World War II to be attempting to handle more passengers on a daily basis in a smaller space.

UNDOING THE SHAMEFUL ACT OF VANDALISM.

New York's "redeveloped" Pennsylvania Station has been a dump since the day it opened, and New York's governor Andrew Cuomo has new hopes for a fresh start. "Overall space for passengers to circulate would be increased by 50%, creating a ‘holistic and interconnected world class station’ to be known as the Empire Station Complex."  There's nothing like "holistic, interconnected, world class" to activate the jive detector.  But the dump needs work.

Today Penn Station handles around 650,000 passengers, far in excess of a design capacity of 200,000 when the current concourse arrangement was laid out in the 1960s. This saw the original buildings and façade demolished to create room for the Madison Square Garden arena to sit over the station.

The current layout dates from the low ebb of intercity passenger rail, with the expectation that most of the traffic would be commuters who would use the station simply to get off trains before work and hustle onto trains after work, with perhaps a few coffee or beer stands as circumstances dictate.

And during World War II, 400,000 passengers in a day was a crush load.

New York Pennsylvania Station, July 1944
Life Google Images via The Bowery Boys.

On the other hand, the latest plan hopes to "bring light and air into this underground purgatory."

A priority for the latest refurbishment is to ensure natural light can penetrate down to concourse and platform level. Other objectives include widening of existing corridors, reconfiguring existing ticket offices, improving access to and from street level and simplifying navigation around the station, which is served by NJ Transit and MTA Long Island Rail Road commuter rail services and six Subway lines as well as Amtrak’s long-distance trains.

The refurbished Penn concourse would be linked by a series of corridors, lifts and elevators to the Farley building. Preparatory works on the Farley site have already begun, with the lower concourse and walking routes to the Subway due for completion later this year. Cuomo also reported that state and federal environmental approval had already been secured for the rest of the work on the building. It is envisaged that the Farley extension would open before work starts to refurbish Penn itself in order to minimise disruption.

It's always going to be difficult to simplify pedestrian navigation, with track level necessarily far below street level in order for the trains to be able to dive under the rivers.  That, however, made for some dramatic vistas in the original station.

Pennsylvania Station, New York, as built.

And refurbishment in phases will be easier with additional passenger capacity.  The mid-1960s redevelopment involved closing sections of the station, removing them, installing the new structure, and opening it.  This concourse area remained in operation almost continuously, with framing for the Madison Square Garden going in a piece at a time, and the upper works cut away after the framing was finished.

THE CREAKY ROLLING BANK VAULT.

I had occasion to ride the Acela Express a couple of different times early in 2001, i.e. before the terrorist attacks.  At the time, the trains rode rather solidly, as you would expect of something built to North American crashworthiness standards and expected to be Amtrak's entry in the bullet train sweepstakes.  The paired windows put me in mind of the prewar "American Flyer" lightweight cars common on New Haven and Boston and Maine, and for a while the name American Flyer was in the running for the name of the fleet.  "Acela" is a neologist portmanteau of "acceleration" and "excellence" undoubtedly cooked up by an expensive steering committee.

Images and commentary below the jump.

THE FL-9 IS STILL USEFUL. The latest Destination: Freedom refers to football excursions running through Penn Station.

Sunday, September 20^th, marked the start of a new era for [New Jersey Transit] when they provided service beyond New York City and into Connecticut. Nutmeg State residents boarded New Jersey Transit trains in New Haven bound for Secaucus, New Jersey, where they would change trains and continue on to Meadowlands Stadium to see the New York Jets play the New England Patriots. It was an historic moment when Metro North crews took the trains to New York’s Penn Station and then handed them over to NJT crews to complete the trip to the stadium which is walking distance from the Meadowlands train station.

The mind boggles at The Pennsylvania Railroad handing a train off to the Erie. The mind must also contemplate the possibility that Patrick McGinnis was ahead of his time in at least one way.

Passengers had to change at Secaucus because the Metro North line to New Haven and the Amtrak Northeast Corridor Line are electrified. The tracks between Hoboken and the Meadowlands are not. A small army of NJT managers, police, customer service agents and ticket examiners were on hand at Secaucus to see that fans got to the game and other riders were not overwhelmed by the crowds. One NJT manager, who was on duty on the Secaucus platform, told this writer that NJT was using operating moves that had never been used before.

The article does not mention any difficulties returning fans from the game, which is often the more exciting move. The "not electrified" is an incomplete explanation, and hence my FL-9 reference. The first FL-9 dual mode locomotives had a more complicated third-rail shoe capable of collecting current from New York Central's underrunning third rail and from Long Island's overrunning third rail. There are some dual mode locomotives on Metro North, but equipped only to use the underruning third rail into Grand Central Terminal. On the other hand, Long Island has a few dual mode locomotives capable of running into Penn Station. Were none of those available for hire?

THE UPGRADES ARE TACKY AND TEMPORARY.

Even the attempts to improve New York's Pennsylvania Station go awry.

Here's what building for the ages looked like.

Apparently, even a new suburban-level concourse making easier connections between Long Island or Jersey Coast trains and the Eighth Avenue subway and a street exit into the old Post Office is tacky and shoddy.

The floor of Penn Station’s newly opened “state-of-the-art” West End Concourse is already cracking at the seams.

The $300 million underground concourse — which opened in June to connect the transit hub to the James A. Farley Post Office on Eighth Avenue — is plagued with at least a half-dozen large fissures, some a quarter of an inch wide and nearly 20 feet long, and numerous smaller cracks.

There's never enough time to do it right the first time, but evidently there will be plenty of time to do it over.

Kenn Gaither, 57, a city tour guide, said he first noticed the fissures in December. And they’ve only grown since, he said.

“We were all so excited when it opened. It looked so clean and well-lit,” Gaither said of the space. “But we haven’t even gotten through the first year, and it’s already starting to fall apart.”

The new concourse was part of the first phase of a larger $1.6 billion construction project at the transit hub.

Fat lot of good that will do, if the North River tubes fail. That's a non-trivial risk.

There are too many people in Penn Station because there are too many trains—more than 1,300 arrivals and departures every weekday, twice the number from four decades ago. With so much traffic, small problems routinely compound into big ones; a 10-minute delay for one train backs up dozens more, and then tens of thousands of people are kept from their destinations. Every late train bleeds the economy: Executives miss board meetings, tourists don’t spend, hourly workers get a smaller paycheck.

Yes, current daily loadings approach peak volumes in the middle of the War, a time when Erie or Lackawanna commuters were riding trains to their own Hoboken terminals, rather than on NJ Transit trains into Penn Station, and many of the Jersey Coast passengers were using Exchange Place.  The Pennsylvania Railroad never anticipated commuter ridership growing the way it did (and with no place to run new expressways into Manhattan, we're not done yet) and thought they could get away with a shrunken "redeveloped" Pennsylvania Station.

The addition of New Jersey Transit trains in the 1990s was both an economic boon to the region—I bought a house in Maplewood, N.J., in 1996 so I could ride the new Midtown Direct to work—and the beginning of Penn Station’s transformation from mere malodorous eyesore to Hieronymus Bosch-grade hellhole. With Jersey commuters swarming the place, farsighted politicians presented grand visions for upgrading it. They all failed.

The North River tubes, moreover, are life-expired.

Amtrak says that within seven years, one of them is likely to have been so weakened by Sandy’s aftereffects that it will have to be taken out of service for at least 18 months’ worth of repairs. “There will come a time when the reliability of the tunnels starts to decay,” says Charles “Wick” Moorman, the co-CEO of Amtrak until the end of 2017. “The curve, once it starts, may be fairly sharp. We’ll just have to see. Nobody knows. This is a great science experiment. Kids playing with chemicals.”

If Amtrak and New Jersey Transit have to rely on a single Hudson tunnel, they could operate just six trains an hour, rather than the current 24.

Yes, and Exchange Place, the Erie terminal, and the Jersey Central terminal are long gone, or out of service and off the rail network.

These commuters could try to cram onto the Port Authority’s PATH trains, which carry 292,000 commuters a day through different Hudson tunnels, but they’re already near capacity. There are always ferries. But does a region that has prided itself on being ahead of the rest of the world truly want to see the large-scale return of a mode of transportation from the 19th century?

Others could drive to work, but the trans-Hudson bridges and tunnels available to cars already have punishing rush-hour delays. Imagine the backups, road rage, and pollution if tens of thousands of additional commuters had to use them.

Might be good for real-estate values in Hoboken and the Palisades, or perhaps a selling point for Cleveland or Milwaukee. Providing an improved concourse in the Post Office building, though?

Meanwhile, across the street from the station, work has begun on the renovation of the James A. Farley Post Office building—the Beaux Arts masterpiece Senator Moynihan eyed in the 1990s. Separate from the Gateway project, it’s being converted into a new entrance hall for Amtrak and LIRR trains (and a glassy shopping center) and is scheduled to open in 2020. In August, Cuomo, who’s widely seen as considering a bid for the presidency, held a triumphant press conference at the site that had the feel of a political rally. “At a time when there is confusion in this country, and there is anger in this country, and there’s anxiety and despair, New York is headed in the only direction we know, which is going forward!” he said, slicing the air with his right hand.

But the $1.6 billion Moynihan Train Hall, as it will be known, isn’t likely to significantly reduce congestion, according to NYU’s Moss. Amtrak and LIRR passengers will still be able to access the train complex from the existing Penn Station, which is a block closer to the center of Manhattan. (The Cuomo administration says the impact will be greater.) Moss is among those who scoff at the idea of prettying the upper-level train station experience when what lies beneath is a such mess. “We don’t need a transit temple,” he says. “We need to focus on the tunnels and getting more tracks into Manhattan.”

We'll be watching.

UNDO THE SHAMEFUL ACT OF VANDALISM.

The editorial board of New York's Times want to Make Penn Station Great Again.

[Governor Andrew] Cuomo has a plan for Penn, but it falls short of the radical intervention that the blighted hub so badly needs. Most of it takes place across the street, on the other side of Eighth Avenue, where Mr. Cuomo has been turning the grand but obsolete Farley Post Office into a new arrival hall for Amtrak. That will move an estimated 20 percent of 650,000 daily riders out of Penn — a good step, but not a transformative one. A vast majority of the riders who stay put will see some modest improvements to the dungeon: a wider concourse and better signage and LED lighting on the ceiling meant to evoke blue sky and clouds. This may make the station slightly less unpleasant, but it will still be dangerously crowded, poorly designed and inadequate: a mass-transit disgrace.

Redirecting the Acela crowd into a different concourse, using the space once dedicated to getting mail to trackside, will mean less interference with the dashing commuters (I really want someone with more artistic skills than I to render Dashing Dan, the legendary symbol of The Long Island Rail Road, thumbing his device and crashing into another dashing commuter.)

But the footprint of the station has remained the same, from the grand opening in the Samuel Rea era until today, and the tracks have to be forty feet below street level in order to get under the North River at a sufficient depth so as not to be punctured by a hurriedly dropped anchor.  As New Haven Superintendent, Passenger Traffic John Droege noted, "The average traveler will be dumfounded [c.q.] when he views the magnificent waiting room and concourse for the first time, but in more cases than a few the immensity of things and the magnificence will lose their luster when he has traversed the 'magnificent distance' from the sidewalk to the train or vice versa."  (Passenger Terminals and Trains, page 157.)  And lead architect Charles McKim envisioned Pennsylvania Station as a place for the well-do to make grand entrances, with armies of redcaps to schlep the luggage.  Commuters were supposed to go to Exchange Place and ride the Hudson Tubes.  The Long Island Rail Road did not become a serious commuter carrier until the Levittowns showed up.  Now, though, commuter trains off, horribile dictu, the Lackawanna, mingle with the Jersey Coast and Long Island, on the seventeen through and four stub track in place since 1910.

But the editors at the Times want to work on the station's structure first.

Penn Station is the busiest train station in America and by far the most miserable. It is the product of a cascade of governmental failures — of design and basic maintenance, but also of political will and imagination. Instead of defending his plan, Mr. Cuomo would be better off fixing it. He should concentrate his efforts on where the problem is — on removing Madison Square Garden and building a new Penn Station instead of touching up a dungeon. Mr. Chakrabarti has given him the blueprint.

The plan: remove all the inner structure from the Garden and keep the shell as an enormous cylindrical skylight. (If you're going to do that, why not rediscover all the support columns from the original concourse and put back the Great Room and train hall?)

First, though, wouldn't it make sense to think about how the replacements for the North River tunnels, and the two new tubes that both New York and New Jersey see as essential to keep the Exchange Place and Hoboken trains coming to Midtown, and the platforms, and the connections to the Long Island coach yard and the Amtrak route for Albany and beyond go together, and then think about the station building?

RUNNING BEYOND THE WIRES.

California's bullet train service might go into operation sooner, and more cheaply.

Some of the cost and time savings will come from a “blended” approach to rail construction, merging the new bullet trains with existing commuter lines. It would involve upgrading commuter rail in L.A. and in the San Francisco Bay Area while building the initial HSR line in the Central Valley as planned using federal funds.  Los Angeles gets linked to the Central Valley first, then San Francisco in a following phase.

The blended approach, however, involves changes of trains, an inconvenience to passengers, until the entire high-speed line is in place. That will discourage passengers. On a through train, you may be late, but you will get to your destination. On a train that makes connections, you may be late, and fail to make your connection. Sometimes that's adventurous, when a failed six minute connection in Cologne requires an improvised search for quarters in Brussels. But as a regular business proposition, it is something to be avoided.  The editorial writers of the Sacramento Bee are satisfied with the changes of trains, at least for now.

From Merced to Burbank, no longer would passenger trains, like Amtrak's San Joaquin, have to share travel with BNSF or Union Pacific freight lines – which have a maximum speed of 79 miles per hour.

This dedicated tracking not only would improve passenger service, it would free up freight capacity south of Merced. And no longer would passengers have to take a bus from Bakersfield to Burbank – because the only rail line is a busy, slow Union Pacific freight line over the Tehachapi Mountains. High-speed rail would have its own tracks.

In that first phase, the system also would connect, through a "blended system" to existing  – making the cost to build the larger network a lot cheaper. Riders would jump off high-speed rail at Burbank and on to Metrolink to get to Los Angeles. As High-Speed Rail Authority chairman Dan Richard said, "That beats the hell out of the car trip" – and with future improvements would beat airplane travel.

In our region, passengers would see improvements in Amtrak's San Joaquin rail service between Sacramento and Merced – improving speeds from 79 mph to 125 mph. Passengers from the Sacramento region would be able to get to greater Los Angeles with a single transfer, cutting travel time from what is now almost eight hours to just over five hours – competitive with car travel.

The suggested 125 mph speed on the new line suggests either best-practice diesel trains, or electrification. The commuter lines are not electrified, although the Peninsula commute service may be electrified as part of the Passenger Rail upgrades.  Transfers between faster intercity trains and suburban trains presumably take place at the end of electrified zones.

That involves unnecessary inconvenience for passengers.  Railroads have, for a long time, looked for ways to run an electric locomotive beyond the wires, either with an onboard power plant or with a battery.

Lackawanna tri-power locomotive 3501, somewhere in New Jersey.

Railroad Magazine photograph. 

Scanned from p. 302 of Middleton, When the Steam Railroads Electrified.

In 1930, the state of the art was a locomotive with electric motors energized by the overhead wire, or by a battery recharged by an onboard diesel-powered generator.  Hermann Lemp had recently worked out the control system that prevented the electric motors, which draw maximum current at startup, from stalling out the diesel engine.  A hybrid that could go from battery to diesel-energized motors was not in the card.

Locomotive builders have learned a few things in the past eighty years.  New Jersey Transit operate a fleet of dual-mode locomotives, originally purchased with the intent of operating through trains from the never-electrified Erie lines into Penn Station, a project that has been set back by the cancellation of the new North River tunnels into the sub-sub-basement of Penn Station.  The carrier still sees possibilities for dual mode operation of commuter trains.

"This kind of equipment never existed; this is the first of its kind," [Martin E.] Robins, director emeritus of the Alan M. Voorhees Transportation Center at Rutgers University [and retired from New Jersey Transit], said as he eyed a dual-powered locomotive on Track A at Newark Penn Station. "There were years when it was said this kind of a locomotive could never be built."

Transit officials say the locomotives will allow for more one-seat rides for the thousands of passengers who now must transfer between trains.

At the Wayne Transit Center, for example, passengers travelling to New York City now ride a diesel-powered train for 10 minutes to Montclair State University. Then, after a 16-minute wait, they board an electric-powered train and ride 59 minutes to New York Penn Station because a diesel train can’t be operated in the tunnels to New York.

By "this type of locomotive, he's presumably referring to a locomotive capable of sustained running either in electric or diesel-electric mode. New Haven (now Metro-North in Connecticut) and Long Island have such locomotives, capable of drawing power from the third rail for short distances, then having extended range in diesel mode, and British Rail's Southern Region had locomotives with a short range in diesel mode, as was the case for Lackawanna's two tri-power units.

The applicability of such power to California is evident.  Electrify the Peninsula commute zone and the high-speed lines with the same voltage and frequency, then equip the diesel with sufficient fuel capacity to cover the non-electrified parts, and offer a single seat service, with a mode change during a station stop.