(The following article by Matthew Wald was posted on the New York Times website on February 1.)
NEW YORK — The East Side access project, a plan to bring Long Island Rail Road trains to Grand Central Terminal that has moved in fits and starts for 40 years, has hit a snag: Amtrak’s financial straits.
Since the 1960’s, the plan has been to run Long Island Rail Road trains from an existing complex of switches in Queens, shared with Amtrak, over about a mile of new track to an underused tunnel beneath the East River. That tunnel emerges in Manhattan at East 63rd Street, and from there, the trains would go through a new tunnel and join the tracks under Park Avenue that carry Metro-North trains to Grand Central. The new link would move perhaps 90,000 passengers a day on about 150 trains. It would relieve crowding at Pennsylvania Station and lure to the rails Long Island residents who work in east Midtown.
An agreement between Amtrak and the Long Island is needed because of the tangled history of the area’s railroads. Amtrak’s Northeast corridor was largely assembled by the old Pennsylvania Railroad. About a century ago, that railroad bought the Long Island Rail Road to get access to Manhattan. Now their ownership is separate again, with the Long Island owned by the Metropolitan Transportation Authority and the Northeast corridor going to Amtrak. Ownership of the tracks in Queens is shared.
Amtrak insists that the project is not for its customers, and should therefore not cost it any money. Amtrak lives on subsidies from Congress, and the railroad says it lacks the resources to bring its aging infrastructure into a state of good repair.
It also fears delays for its trains on its major route, the Boston-New York-Washington corridor.
The East Side access project also faces substantial engineering problems, mostly in digging from the East River to Park Avenue. The project would be the largest ever undertaken by the Metropolitan Transportation Authority. The plan was conceived in the 60’s, when the 63rd Street tunnel was built. In the early 1990’s, plans were drawn up to finish the job by 1998, with about a mile of additional tunnel on either side of the existing tunnel under the river, at a cost of about $3 billion. Now the completion date is 2012 and the price is $6.3 billion.
The immediate problem, though, is on the Long Island end, at the Sunnyside Yard in Queens, owned by Amtrak, and the adjacent Harold Interlocking, a two-mile complex used for sorting trains. On the western end are two tracks carrying trains to Penn Station and two more tracks carrying them back, as well as two more that peel off toward Long Island City and Brooklyn.
On the east are additional tracks. Two of them go to the Hell Gate Bridge and then into the Bronx, a route Amtrak takes to join the Metro-North tracks in New Rochelle on its way to New Haven and Boston. Two other tracks go to the Long Island Rail Road’s Port Washington branch, and four go to Jamaica, Queens, and the other branches of the railroad.
During the commuter rush, trains roar through Harold Interlocking at the rate of 42 an hour. But the transportation authority would like to increase that to 66. The task is not much different from untangling the intersection of two busy, multilane streets, except that the trains are up to a quarter-mile long and some lumber through at 15 miles an hour, making maneuvering difficult.
The transportation authority is considering digging one or more tunnels so that trains coming out of Penn Station can turn left to head for Hell Gate and New England without having to cross over at grade level in front of oncoming westbound trains. That would give Amtrak an incentive to consent to allowing the work to be done on its property, authority officials say. Whatever the changes in layout, they will be for the long term, according to rail executives. “It’s got to last 100 years,” said James Dermody, president of the Long Island Rail Road, who pointed out that the current configuration of Harold was in place for the opening of the first Penn Station, in 1908.
A reconfigured Harold Interlocking could be a major boon for Amtrak, which often sees its trains lose valuable time as they pass through Harold on their way to Hell Gate and New Rochelle. Timeliness is crucial there because Metro-North, which owns the tracks from New Rochelle to New Haven, is so busy that it has assigned Amtrak “slots” at specific times, and Amtrak has been known to miss the window.
But there is also peril, in the form of extra costs. Amtrak says that the soil at Sunnyside and Harold is filled with toxic substances that have leaked or been dumped. Amtrak, near broke, is refusing to let work proceed until the transportation authority agrees to protect Amtrak against all liability and costs arising from stirring up poison dirt.
In addition, New Jersey Transit uses the yard to store trains. That, too, could be disrupted, Amtrak warned. It has sent the transportation authority a series of blunt letters, signed by David L. Gunn, now president of Amtrak, who was president of the New York Transit Authority, a component of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, from 1984 until 1990.
The Metropolitan Transportation Authority insists that the dispute is not serious. Referring to contaminated soil, William M. Wheeler, the director of planning at the Long Island, said, “Amtrak hasn’t shown us anything to indicate that.” But Amtrak has avoided the word “share.” “I must have an agreement that will not produce any additional financial burdens on Amtrak,” Mr. Gunn wrote to Peter S. Kalikow, chairman of the transportation authority, on Dec. 4. In an earlier letter he complained that the authority was proceeding “without directly addressing Amtrak’s concerns.”
Both sides say discussions are continuing, with no agreement so far.