Gateway Project/New York Penn Station capacity improvement

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I like that idea, but isn't digging under Manhattan a pain in the you-know-where with all the utility pipes and cables?
I've been told that the Lexington Avenue subway line was in the way, so they didn't do that.

jb

Digging from 31st or 33rd Streets up to 42nd Street wouldn't be nearly as far as the new LIRR ESA tunnel...(from 63rd down to around 38th Streets), although making the junction to all 4 East River lines would take a lot of work.

The Lexington Avenue subway line runs under Park Avenue until around 41st Street where it transitions Northeast over to Lexington. So if the new line from Penn would travel under Madison, it should not impact the Lexington subway line. It could also transition diagonally parallel to the subway to reach the lower level GCT tracks..

As far as the engineering difficulty that @jis mentioned...I had not taken that into account on my proposal. If you would compare the total effort either way, I am not sure that my proposal would have cost more or not, but it certainly would have afforded a lot more traffic flow options. Even more, if additional tubes were constructed. And like the 63rd Street tubes, provision could have been made for a new subway crossing piggybacked with it, to provide another crossing to Queens...

Anyway, it's all moot now...
 
@railiner, Your proposal (actually a vrsion pretty close to it) was considered in the early days when the ARC MIS document was being developed (this was in the '70s, it's been a while). It was rejected for reasons I described. It did not make it to the list of plausible Alternatives that were presented in the ARC MIS document.
 
The Daily news ignored an item about Penn south. The very long range plans are to extend the stub tracks to become thru tracks then thru east river tunnel bores 5 and 6. The new bores are possible because they will duplicate the same elevations as the present East river tunnel bores. Then Penn south can become the main Amtrak platforms with its wider platforms.

However bores 5 and 6 cannot be started as they come very close to either Water main 1 or 2 in elevation. Water main #3 has to be completed and connected south of Penn before the proposed bores 5 and 6 can be started. Then Penn south will become the main platforms for most of the Amtrak thru trains and will connect to Sunnyside yard SSY as well..

One thought 5 and 6 could be started from the Queens side stopping short of the water main until water main 3 is connoted speeding up the final connection to Penn south. Any chance that would happen? Not likely ?

Do not worry most of us will be long gone before it is completed but still we can hope.
 
The Daily news ignored an item about Penn south. The very long range plans are to extend the stub tracks to become thru tracks then thru east river tunnel bores 5 and 6. The new bores are possible because they will duplicate the same elevations as the present East river tunnel bores. Then Penn south can become the main Amtrak platforms with its wider platforms.

However bores 5 and 6 cannot be started as they come very close to either Water main 1 or 2 in elevation. Water main #3 has to be completed and connected south of Penn before the proposed bores 5 and 6 can be started. Then Penn south will become the main platforms for most of the Amtrak thru trains and will connect to Sunnyside yard SSY as well..

One thought 5 and 6 could be started from the Queens side stopping short of the water main until water main 3 is connoted speeding up the final connection to Penn south. Any chance that would happen? Not likely ?

Do not worry most of us will be long gone before it is completed but still we can hope.
Can you provide a citation or a reference to a document that presents this or otherwise point to a source? Thanks.

There is a reason I ask this question.

Water Tunnel 1 is nowhere near the path of the projected tunnels 5 and 6. You are probably confusing yourself with the recollection that eastward construction from the earlier ARC deep station under 34th St was blocked by Water Tunnel 1. But that is history, long gone and hopefully forgotten.

The main problem for breaking out to the east from NYPSS is the 7th Ave subway and the 6th Ave subway and PATH tunnels, both of which slope downwards to the south and are a little deeper at 31st or 30th Sts, than at 32nd and 33rd St.

This was discovered in early planning and according to folks at Amtrak NEC Capital Projects (Drew Galloway - now at PB), they changed plans to make the NYPSS tracks (and hence platforms) at a slightly greater depth (~10-15') than the rest of Penn Station so as to be able to needle those tunnels through the maze to the east that it has to pass through while staying within the ruling gradient limits, if and when they get built. Right now there is neither any plan or funding nor any EIS to do so.

Incidentally it was also Drew Galloway who spearheaded the entire effort to build the approach tunnel under the West Side development to preserve an entry into Penn Station from the projected new Hudson Tunnels.

As for Penn South becoming the main Amtrak station, that is pure speculation based on not much.

Incidentally the grand visionary plan for Penn South also has a four track very deep station under the same Block 780 in a bored tunnel, for use by High Speed service. This is deep enough to not interfere with Tunnel 1, and involves all sorts of additional under river tunnels, and hence unlikely to see the proverbial light of the day. :) Maybe you are confusing that part of the draft document with the 8 track Penn South that Cuomo is talking about?
 
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That would be a long way along 14th Street from the Hudson. The 'L' subway line already runs along it, as far as the 8th Avenue Station, where it meets the A, C, and E lines. There isn't very much around 14th and 8th as a 'destination'.....

New hudson tunnels can be built to 14th street and 8th Avenue which can act as a convenient transfer station to the subway--which would also help offload Penn Station.
 
Or, instead of going to Penn Station, what about building new tunnel to Hudson Yards, like what NYC did with the 7 train?
 
The GDC mentioned this past Friday that procurement is moving forward for the PNB project and utility relocation has begun for the final phase of the Hudsin Yards Concrere Casing.

I'm sure that some of you still believe that tunnels should be built to a different location instead of the current Penn Station.
 
The new tunnel bores must go to NYP. The old tunnel casings are getting in desperate condition with many leaks. Note all the water located in this link.
In a leaky underwater rail tunnel, workers race against time (msn.com)

That is an excellent article about the state we find the Hudson River Tunnels in today. It has been well over a hundred and 20 years since Tunnel Engineer Charles Jacob was brought into the fold by Austin Corbin to plan the first of the tunnels. The fact that they have lasted this long is a testimony to the talents of these visionaries.

It is not out of the realm of possibility that either, or both tracks could wind up out of service for an extended time, imagine what that would do to service along the Northeast Corridor. Hoboken Terminal and New York Penn would wind up being end points.

For anyone interested in a detailed account of the original tunnel planning and construction, I highly recommend the book, The Late, Great, Pennsylvania Station, by Lorraine B. Diehl.

Ken
 
There are two things getting confounded...

1. There was the ARC Alternative G, which was to build a new pair of tunnels to connect the low number tracks of Penn Station into the lower level of Grand Central Terminal. This was considered to be prohibitively expensive and required moving at least one of the tunnels of the Lexington Avenue Subway. MTA kiboshed it saying "no way, no how". Additional problem was that now one had thought through the traffic flow issue if you inserted a pile of trains from Penn station into the already messy situation at Grand Central.

The official reason for not doing Alternative G was none of these. I kid you not: it was that the real estate which it would have to run under is "too expensive". Right there in the Major Investment Study and the Alternatives Analysis. The analysis may have been wrong, but it said the actual construction was cheaper than all other alternatives, the operations were cheaper than all other alternatives, the ridership was highest, but that real estate acquisition costs would be very high. They were also concerned about "uncertainty" with the effects on "existing operations" but that frankly seemed minimal by the time they abandoned Alt G. I believe they would have had to move the connector between the 42nd St. Shuttle and the Lexington Avenue Line, and of course lose the Oyster Bar.

The official reason for rejecting it was not wanting to pay off the owners of a bunch of very valuable skyscrapers for the curve from north-south to east-west. This may even have been correct, as those rich owners are quite capable of causing massive costs and massive delays (take a look at how Beverly Hills delayed LA's Purple Line). But at the time it felt like they were looking for excuses to ignore the results of their own study.
 
The official reason for not doing Alternative G was none of these. I kid you not: it was that the real estate which it would have to run under is "too expensive".
Pardon my ignorance but " real estate costs" for a tunnel!? I am assuming you mean the actual tunnel and not access points & other items that would actually infring on existing buildings.
 
Pardon my ignorance but " real estate costs" for a tunnel!? I am assuming you mean the actual tunnel and not access points & other items that would actually infring on existing buildings.
If you own a parcel of land, you own it all the way down to the center of the earth. Thus, if someone wants to dig a tunnel under your skyscraper, they have to pay you whatever you want to charge them. If you're the typical New York real estate mogul, that will, indeed be a very, very high figure. This is in addition to the cost of whatever technical measures are needed to keep the skyscraper you're tunneling under from falling down.
 
Unless the subsurface rights have been sold separately from the surface land. Very common in mining country. Dunno about NYC.
Yeah, I guess that could happen. That would just make it worse, as then you'd have two parties with whom to negotiate. (Whoever owns the skyscraper on the surface is going to be very concerned that the tunneling won't cause his skyscraper to collapse.)
 
Just for fun, more controversy about the Penn Station redevelopment. I don't think this affects the new Hudson river tunnels, but I believe that the idea is to get some big bux for the real estate development to pay for improvements for the station. That's probably not controversial. The problem seems to be the scale and nature of the proposed devleopment.

Activists rally against massive new development planned for Penn Station area (msn.com)
 
It is the proposal to raze Block 780 to build Penn Station South that has got some activists riled up. That is a completely expected thing. They also got up in arms about the Hudson Yard development until an appropriate amount of money changed hands AFAICT.

Ultimately it will depend on what real estate owners wish to see happen. At least in the NY real estate market money talks and everything else walks, and bigger the money, louder the action.
 
It is the proposal to raze Block 780 to build Penn Station South that has got some activists riled up. That is a completely expected thing. They also got up in arms about the Hudson Yard development until an appropriate amount of money changed hands AFAICT.

Ultimately it will depend on what real estate owners wish to see happen. At least in the NY real estate market money talks and everything else walks, and bigger the money, louder the action.
At least a certain Family now residents of Florida wont be involved in this Scheme!😉
 
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