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.