(The following story by Mark Ginocchio appeared on the Stamford Advocate website on May 22.)
NEW YORK — The Metropolitan Transportation Authority and New York City have agreed on a funding plan for a new Metro-North Railroad station at Yankee Stadium, moving New Haven Line customers a step closer to taking the train directly to the game.
The MTA will contribute $52 million and New York City will foot the other $39 million needed to open the rail station in the first half of the 2009 season, when the Yankees start play in their new stadium, Metro-North officials announced yesterday at their monthly board meeting in Manhattan.
“This is a long-awaited need for this general area,” Metro-North President Peter Cannito said.
For years, “people wished they could take the train to Yankee Stadium,” Cannito said. Now all three Metro-North lines will stop there, “plus there’s service from the city itself,” he said.
The station will be on the Hudson Line in the Bronx, though the New Haven and Harlem lines will access the stop en route to the Harlem-125th Street station and Grand Central Terminal.
The railroad and Connecticut Department of Transportation have not set a schedule for the service, though they speculate that on game days about 10 trains will run systemwide, carrying 6,000 to 10,000 passengers per game, with a capacity of 12,000.
Because of the high number of commuter trains running in the Bronx during the evening rush-hour, New Haven Line commuters attending evening games and leaving afternoon games on weekdays probably will have to transfer at the Harlem-125th station to access Yankee Stadium shuttle trains on the Hudson Line, Metro-North officials said.
New Haven Line customers probably will have direct service to the stadium on weekends and after night games because demand will be lower on the rest of the Hudson Line, officials said.
The Metro-North shuttles will complement New York City subway service to Yankee Stadium, and may get fans to the game from midtown Manhattan faster, railroad officials said.
They estimate the Grand Central to Yankee Stadium service, which will include a stop at Harlem-125th Street, will take 15 minutes.
The MTA board has to approve the agreement tomorrow. Construction will begin soon afterward, but because it took the MTA and New York longer than anticipated to agree to the spending plan, the railroad is targeting June 2009 as the completion date, two months after the season begins.
The station will have two platforms each the length of 10 cars, four staircases and two elevators that will connect to a 10,000-square-foot mezzanine. From the mezzanine, a 450-foot-long, 25-foot-wide overpass will lead to the stadium, parking and ferry, and new parks will be built on the waterfront. The overpass will be north of 153rd Street.
Under the agreement, the MTA will pay for the station, ticket booths, a customer information system and half of the mezzanine. The city will pay for the overpass and mezzanine.
One difficulty was determining how to manage game-day crowds, Cannito said.
To gauge crowd control, Metro-North officials said they monitored the Long Island Railroad station at Shea Stadium during New York Mets playoff games last year.
Jeffrey Maron, a Stamford commuter and member of the Connecticut Rail Commuter Council, said the additional Metro-North trains “could be a logistical nightmare.”
“Considering the problems the system has today and given Metro-North’s communication skills, are they going to be able to tell customers which trains go to the Bronx and which trains go to Grand Central?” Maron said.