The Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s $2.9 billion effort to link Metro-North to Penn Station will take at least three years longer than originally planned, largely because of Amtrak’s failure to deliver on its promised level of cooperation in the megaproject, MTA officials said Monday.
The project, which was originally pegged for completion in March 2027, now won’t be finished until the second quarter of 2030 at the earliest, and could drag on into 2032 if Amtrak, which owns much of the track infrastructure, doesn’t get its act together, MTA officials said Monday in a Manhattan presentation to board members.
“This is the MTA trying not to repeat East Side Access,” MTA chairman and CEO Janno Lieber said, referring to the delay-plagued project to link the Long Island Rail Road to Grand Central Terminal.
That effort was delayed by more than a decade, in part because of the “same type of problems we’re talking about here” — namely, a lack of cooperation from Amtrak, Lieber said.
In a statement, Amtrak officials said they “remain committed to this critical project, and being good stewards of taxpayer investment for Amtrak, MTA customers, New York residents, and travelers.”
Amtrak said it is working with the MTA on several strategies to speed the project along, including by providing more frequent, and longer, track outages, taking over some work that was previously being done by contractors, boosting assigned personnel and even “temporarily suspending Amtrak trains to allow more work to be done safely.”
The MTA’s Penn Station Access project aims to connect Metro-North’s New Haven Line to the LIRR’s longtime primary Manhattan terminal, while also building three new railroad stations in the Bronx on Amtrak’s Hell Gate Line.
Although MTA officials said they coordinated with Amtrak in putting together the project’s schedule, the national passenger rail provider has consistently failed to deliver the promised track outages and personnel needed to carry out work on Amtrak’s property.
As one example, said Jamie Torres-Springer, president of MTA Construction and Development, Amtrak had committed to providing 48 weekend track outages in the first two years of the project’s construction. Instead, it did so only seven times, Torres-Springer said.
Even when Amtrak did take its tracks out of service, it often didn’t provide the needed personnel, including foremen, required to carry out the work. When Amtrak hired more workers to make up for the shortages, problems still arose, as Amtrak union work rules mandated more personnel than necessary at certain work sites, MTA officials said.
MTA officials noted they’ve also run into some issues with their own contractor on the project, but said they have had “relatively small impacts” compared with those involving Amtrak.
Although the project won’t get done before 2030, MTA officials said they are working on a plan to launch Metro-North service at the three planned Bronx stations — Co-Op City, Morris Park and Parkchester — by 2027, potentially using temporary stations.
Alfonso Castillo has been reporting for Newsday since 1999 and covering the transportation beat since 2008. He grew up in the Bronx and Queens and now lives in Valley Stream with his wife and two sons.
