NJ-ARP Blog

Re-establish Regional Rail Mobility Priorities;
Permit Building of Rail Link Between New York-Penn Station and Grand Central Terminal

During the last two weeks, Regional Citizens Liaison Committee (RCLC) meetings have been held for both the Trans-Hudson Express Tunnel (T.H.E.) and the Portal Bridge Capacity Enhancement projects. The changes advanced at these meetings will have a profound effect on the mobility of New Jersey residents for the next century, severely reducing the scope of through-train operations linking New Jersey, New York, and Connecticut.

The New Jersey Association of Railroad Passengers (NJ-ARP) sadly concludes that the twin efforts are, instead, an extremely costly exercise to provide six more tracks at New York Penn Station (NYP) for enhanced access by New Jersey Transit (NJT) trains.

NJ-ARP calls upon the New Jersey Transit Board of Directors, its executive director, and federal and state planning agencies to combine preliminary engineering efforts for both projects, and re-examine the goals of what could be — and should be — a unified tri-state effort to devise additional mobility options for the metropolitan region’s current and future regional rail riders. We urge NJ Transit to adopt a comprehensive, affordable and achievable interstate rail solution to include the re-incorporation of a rail link between New York Penn Station and Grand Central Terminal.

As if to reinforce NJ-ARP’s conclusion, NJT’s planners are now identifying the additional pancaked tracks under 34th Street (now in a revised 3 track-over-3 track configuration) as 22 through 27, thereby continuing the numbering pattern at NYP which ends at 21. This conclusion has been reached reluctantly after a thorough and on-going review of the literature published by the project’s principal sponsors during the past 15 years.

No one at NJT, in Trenton, or in Albany should be proud of this conclusion. T.H.E. Tunnel project, as now constituted, subverts the principal goals and intents of the Access to the Region’s Core (ARC) thrust that its sponsors envisioned in 1995:

• Upgrade Mobility Throughout The Region Throughout The Extended Core
• Foster The Development Of A Strong Core For The 21stCentury
• Link All Significant Regional Activity Centers To The Extended Core With Efficient Public Transit
• Provide Improved Means Of Goods Movement Across The Extended Core; and
• Accessibility Of Services To Extended Core Destinations

NJ-ARP notes recent overtures by the Governor of Connecticut proposing through-train running between Connecticut and the Meadowlands (Giants Stadium) for Connecticut football fans. We also note New York City’s Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s comments highlighting that if his congestion pricing scheme is approved and wins federal recognition, monies from that program will be available for trans-Hudson rail projects. Clearly, political momentum exists for regional and trans-jurisdictional transportation co-operation. Do we in New Jersey ignore these signs and ignore the broader requirements of the region? Do we commit to a limiting mistake in steel and concrete that will reverberate for the next century?

NJ-ARP understands that NJT will have to file a Supplementary Environmental Impact Statement (SEIS) statement with the Federal Transit Administration (FTA) in Washington, D.C. due to the de-scoping of the original project design for the 34th Street terminal. This was necessary because of NJT¹s recent decision to reduce in size and scope the stub-end terminal beneath 34th Street from an 8 track (twin 2track over 2 track) configuration to a 3 track over 3 track pattern to avoid interference with New York real estate construction plans and the future Farley Post Office Penn Station expansion. In turn, a completely new round of public hearings will need to be conducted.

Importantly, this decrease in track capacity places in jeopardy future commuter and regional rail service expansion that could have included the Northern Branch, West Shore, Passaic-Bergen Cross-County (Susquehanna), Lackawanna Cutoff, West Trenton and Monmouth-Ocean-Middlesex (MOM) lines.

Here, then, is the perfect opportunity for NJT to re-evaluate both the Trans-Hudson Express tunnel and Portal Bridge Enhancement Project with an eye to combining them, eliminating overlapping segmentation, and addressing the entire issue of midtown Manhattan access and tri-state regional planning initiatives in a unified manner — thereby returning to the goal of the Access to the Region’s Core (ARC) imperative.

This decision to downsize the planned 34th Street “deep cavern” terminal has had wide ranging repercussions for both the new Hudson River tunnel engineering and Portal Bridge replacement options; it certainly led FTA to the new call for public hearings due to the comprehensiveness of the modifications.

Here’s NJ-ARP’s analysis:

NJT has decided to forgo the cut-and-cover Manhattan portion of the new tunnel and let the Tunnel Boring Machines (TBMs) work straight through under 34th Street at an even deeper level. This, in turn, led to a reduction in track gradient under the riverbed (NJ-ARP is told it is now below 1.9%). As a consequence, however, the Manhattan junction between new and old tunnel tracks, used for selecting which station (either NYP or 34th Street) trains would arrive at or depart from, had to be dropped. NJ-ARP has concluded that these actions had a spillover effect on the Portal Bridge Study Team’s deliberations; in essence, the decision point as to where eastbound trains would terminate — either NYP or 34th Street — or westbound trains make their final route and destination selection, has been moved from Manhattan west to an expanded Swift interlocking plan, the present junction of NJT’s Morris & Essex MidTown Direct and NEC lines.

NJ-ARP would like to know if the Governor, members of the state legislature, in particular the transportation committees of the Senate and Assembly, along with the state Congressional delegation in Washington, D.C. have been made aware of the substantial reduction in the scope of the T.H.E. tunnel project?

T.H.E. Tunnel and Portal Bridge projects embrace each other in a symbiotic relationship; NJ-ARP calls for combining both of them, initiating a comprehensive review process to encompass a broad array of changing political and demographic realities and adopting a plan our grandchildren can look back upon as visionary to meet the demands and needs of the 21st century.

Posted by Albert L. Papp, Jr. under Portal Bridge & T.H.E Tunnel.