President-Elect Biden will have a Democratic House and probably a Republican Senate to work with come January. For all the buzz about Amtrak Joe moving into the White House, he is likely to want to accommodate the Senate to a large extent. That means that boosters of infrastructure, including the Amtrak Gateway Project, should plan around continued scarcity of federal funding. The Gateway Project, which would add a 2.7 mile new tunnel under the Hudson linking New Jersey to New York Penn Station, rehabilitate the tunnel that already exists, and quad-track a further 7.5 miles of surface railroad, is a worthy project. It is not worth the current $30 billion asking price. If it were, someone would already be building it. Here, I lay out my thoughts on what needs to happen to get the work done.

Buy the right trains for through running

Today, many trains turn back where they came at Penn Station, wasting capacity. Even famously stodgy Amtrak finds that conversion of those reversals to continuations without handling reverse-peak passengers would enable each platform track to process a train on average every 12 minutes. The Amtrak analysis is pessimistic that trains can discharge peak-direction passengers and load reverse-peak ones while still maintaining 12 minute slots. I am not. After the Moynihan Project is complete, the least-efficient through platform should allow a flow of over 700 passengers per minute. Even with 2 trains carrying around 1,500 people each arriving one after another (2 minutes or so apart) on each side of that platform, such a flow rate should handily clear alighting passengers and allow new boardings within 12 minute slots (which require a 10 minute dwell), or even less. At a train per track every 12 minutes, the 15 through tracks, 7 per direction, should handle at least 35 trains per hour. Crucially, LIRR trains that continue to the West Side Yard via the tracks that can’t reach New Jersey should process through significantly faster than that; they will not take on any reverse-peak passengers and discharge to platforms with even more capacity.

To run through with passengers and not just to yards, NJ Transit and LIRR will need trains that can use both overhead wire and third rail, like the M8 or Class 700. They should be single-level trains built under the new FRA crashworthiness rules to reduce the time that each stop adds. Even factoring in a Buy America premium, modified Class 700s are likely to cost significantly less than the price NJ Transit is prepared to pay for custom-built, overweight Bombardier Multilevels, which will have no ability to use third rail. Because of their sluggish acceleration and slow turnover of passengers, Multilevels provide no capacity advantage over single-level stock. NJ Transit should shelve any further orders for these cars and confine them to Hoboken service. It can apply the savings to electrification and platform projects so that as few trains as possible into Manhattan need diesel engines or low-platform capability.

Unlike today’s bastardized through running, where trains discharge passengers and run empty to yards, true through running will generate new passenger demand on top of using Penn Station more efficiently, generating political support for Gateway and setting up the institutional muscle memory that will maximize the project’s utility. Lighter trains that turn over passengers faster will be able to make more stops in the same travel times, simplifying complex service patterns to the benefit of currently underserved inner suburbs.

Cost control

The Gateway Project should cost nowhere near $30 billion, the current asking price, to build. No rail tunnel in the world, proposed, under construction, or built, has ever cost the $3.5 billion/mile that is being demanded for the new Hudson tubes. This estimate dwarfs costs incurred on even New York tunnel projects. Boring and outfitting the Second Avenue Subway tunnels cost around $500 million/mile, as did the Manhattan tunnels for East Side Access (digging here and outfitting here). Note that the $9.5 billion estimate for the new Gateway tunnel includes no work on any station, which was the source of most of the cost and schedule bloat on Second Avenue and East Side Access. Underwater construction does not account for this premium either; the Channel Tunnel cost $600 million/mile, Crossrail tunnels cost $400 million/mile, and the Fehmarn Fixed Link, which will be wide enough to carry a highway and rail line, is estimated at $800 million/mile. Gateway’s total per-rider cost far outstrips those of comparable projects, a selection of which I tabulate here.

Project	Tunnel length (mi)	Stations	Cost (billion USD)	Estimated new daily trips	Cost per new daily trip
Gateway	2.7 new, 2.5 rehabilitated	2 expanded	$30	200,000	$150,000
Second Avenue Subway Phase I	2.0	3 new, 1 upgraded	$5.8	200,000	$29,000
Paris RER East-Ouest Liaison Express	5.0	3 new, 10 upgraded	$5.7	250,000	$23,000
Brisbane Cross River Rail	3.7	4 new, 2 upgraded	$3.8	150,000	$26,000
London Crossrail	13	10 new, 31 upgraded	$23	500,000	$47,000

The first phase of the Second Avenue Subway just added 200,000 daily transit journeys for $5 billion. That price tag should be generous for Gateway, which promises to add the same amount of daily rides to the Northeast regional rail network. It involves 2.5x as much new or rehabilitated tunnel as Second Avenue Phase I and requires no new underground stations—which were the source of most of the cost and schedule overruns under Second Avenue—to handle its projected travel volume. Yet right now the Gateway planners want six times the cost of Second Avenue Phase I.

If Gateway management just gets as much tunnel per dollar as the MTA managed under Second Avenue, the 2.7-mile new Hudson tunnel is a $1.3 billion project. Let’s say the rehabilitation of the existing tunnel costs as much; that still totals only about 1/4 of the current ask for the new tunnel.

The rest of the trackwork, which is modifications and expansion of the surface railroad, should be a cakewalk in comparison. The NICTD West Lake project is to cost $120 million/mile and includes several surface stations. This is high by rest-of-world standards; the Morley-Ellenbrook line in the Perth suburbs is to cost $70 million/mile. There is no excuse for the quad tracking of the 7.5 miles of railroad from North Bergen to Newark to cost more than $1 billion.

Completion of the Central Concourse and widening of other passageways in Penn Station is estimated at $340 million. It is reasonable to expect a $1 billion expenditure on the station to pay for that plus other improvements such as elongating platforms 1 and 2 to the West End Concourse and redoing other hallways and stairwells.

The lighter cream color denotes public circulation space on the lower concourse level of New York Penn Station. The freight elevator corridor just east of Eighth Avenue is also highlighted as public space, which is a probably a mistake or poor choic… — The lighter cream color denotes public circulation space on the lower concourse level of New York Penn Station. The freight elevator corridor just east of Eighth Avenue is also highlighted as public space, which is a probably a mistake or poor choice of color. Observe how little of the floor plate is open for circulation. Fix that, and the existing station footprint will accommodate the Gateway traffic.

Do not expand Penn Station

The Moynihan Station project will be fully complete in a matter of months, and will have added stairwells and escalators to several platforms that needed them. Amtrak banked on being able to process a train every 12 minutes at each platform in the presence of through running without the benefit of the Moynihan project. Those stairwells will cut the worst clearance times by 1.5 minutes and speed boarding passengers too. Completion of the Central Concourse, which Moynihan did not include and is currently expected to cost $340 million along with other hallway widening, would further speed platform clearance and upstairs flow. All of that should cut 2 minutes from the expected dwell time, giving a train every 10 minutes, or 6 trains per hour, on each track. Across the through running tracks in the station, that yields 42 trains per hour, more than the pre-pandemic combined train volume from Long Island and Connecticut. The four-track terminal at Haussmann-St. Lazare on the Paris RER E handles 16 trains per hour; it is reasonable to expect the four stub-ended tracks at Penn Station to handle at least that same volume coming through the new tunnel. Dedicating a couple more tracks to the new tunnel and extension of the platforms to the West End Concourse should add slightly more capacity.

Plot for a connection to Grand Central

Maximum capacity through the new Hudson tunnel requires a connection from Penn Station’s terminal tracks to Grand Central for two reasons: elimination of conflicts from train reversals and division of the passenger load, and thus the dwell time, over two stations rather than one. The project involves about a mile of tunnel and reconfiguration of Grand Central and Penn Station. A connection to the 100-numbered tracks that serve Westchester County is preferable over one to the 300- or 400-numbered tracks that (will) serve Long Island, since Long Island has a connection to New Jersey that properly fitted dual-power trains would be able to use while the Metro-North network does not.

Linking the 100-numbered tracks southward would require demolition of the elevators that currently serve all those platforms and replacement with elevators to each platform farther north. This work is not free, but it should not be as difficult as digging an entire new city block size hole. The combination of existing plans to route some New Haven Line trains to Penn Station, the increased capacity of a Penn Station-Grand Central tunnel, and just plain turning the trains faster would lighten the load on the upper level platforms. For that reason, I think it is plausible to convert some of those platforms to concourse space leading to elevators and stairwells to the lower-level platforms. Maximizing the connection also probably requires a flyover at Melrose just north of the Harlem River, which would take out the 144th Street bridge over the tracks but should cost low $100-millions.

The reforms that have to be made to build the Gateway Project for $5 billion or less will not only free up money for other projects like the Grand Central-Penn Station, they will help those projects come in at reasonable, if still high by rest-of-world standards, costs. In the presence of a sanely priced Gateway Project, it becomes reasonable to expect $2 billion if not $1 billion to buy the Penn-Grand Central connection plus another tunnel linking the northernmost Penn Station platforms to the Empire Line. It is also then becomes plausible for $5 billion or so to afford a tunnel from the East Side Access caverns to Hoboken via Lower Manhattan, giving Hoboken Division service its own trans-Hudson tunnel and supplanting loads of trans-Hudson buses.

The New York infrastructure sector needs to learn from foreign professionals how to achieve reasonable yields out of each dollar and as it does so advance “organization” and “electronics” components that will improve the utility of the “concrete” if it gets built. We have tried to do the exact opposite for as long as I have been following rail issues. You tell me whether it has worked.