Masive New Rail Project for NYC

[Tom Macrery]

This will be a more extensive treatment of a topic I broached in my posting of a couple days ago under American RR Terms. For those of you who read it, everything I said is still valid, but I made one very wrong assumption. The Metro North connection to the Long Island Railroad is far from complete, it will only be finished in 2015!

After investigating online I discovered a rail project in NYC with more superlatives than an English lesson in the degrees of comparison. Here’s the story:

The NYC Metropolitan Transit Authority (MTA) initiated a project in 1998, construction begun 2001, completion due 2015, to link the Long Island Railroad to the Grand Central Terminal. This project is known as the MTA LIRR East Side Access. (Note, not Grand Central Station; Grand Central is not a through station, but a terminus with all standard gauge trains dead-ending there and having to go back the way they came, that is north out of Manhattan back into the Bronx and then upstate NY, the Old New York Central Railroad.) The present Long Island train service terminates at Pennsylvania Station, also on Manhattan (Indeed a station because there is through service from Penn Station into New Jersey and on to points south.) The oldies among us will remember "Chattanooga Choo Choo" which "leaves Pennsylvania Station 'bout a quarter to four" "read a magazine then you're in Baltimore". We'll also remember and cringe at the opening lines "Pardon me boy, is that the Chattanooga Choo Choo?" "Yeah, man, track 29" "Boy, you can give me a shine". Well, so much for 1941. Back now to the present: For Long Islanders to have to terminate at Penn Station is very inconvenient for most connections on the subway to other parts of Manhattan. Most have to back track to Grand Central and then board the required subway line. The new line will terminate at Grand Central and will be a great boon to Long Island commuters.

There will be 7 miles of tunnel and 24 miles of new track along 3.5 route miles. The tunnels in Manhattan will be bored through solid rock, those in Queens will be cut-and-cover or dug through loose glacial moraine. The tunnels in Queens will be under the extensive Sunnyside Yards. The terminus under Grand Central will be mined out of solid rock. Note that this new terminus will be dug UNDER the existing subway and standard gauge platforms. They will need over 75 escalators to bring the passengers up the 160 feet from the platforms to street level.

When in operation they envisage as many as 24 12-car trains serving Grand Central per hour during peak periods.

The crossover from Queens to Manhattan, under the East River, completes an interesting story in itself. In the late 60’s and early 70’s a tunnel was dug at the 63rd Street level. This tunnel was actually 4 tunnels, 2 upper level tunnels and 2 lower level. The 2 upper level tunnels were immediately used by a new Manhattan-Queens subway line. The lower level was never used, until now! Imagine, for over 30 years two perfectly good tunnels stood idle waiting for their chance.

Here are the promised superlatives:

1 – The Long Island Railroad is the nation’s oldest railroad still operating under its original name – opened 1834.
2 – The Federal grant of $ 2.6 billion is the largest federal grant for any single transportation system in the USA.
3 – This will be the first major rail station in Manhattan in over 90 years.
4 – This will be the largest mined underground terminal ever built in the USA.
5 – This will be the largest passenger rail terminal in the USA since 1930’s.
6 – The New York metropolitan region is home to the nation’s most extensive—and most traveled—rail
transit network, serving approximately 6 million riders per day.
7 – The Long Island Rail Road alone is the largest suburban commuter railroad in the country, carrying
272,000 passengers every 24 hours on 718 trains.
8 – Full use of the existing 63rd Street Tunnel for the first time.
9 – The East Side Access project is a massive project—the largest ever undertaken by the Metropolitan Transportation Authority.
10 – In Queens the lines will rise, to grade, meeting LIRR Main Line and Port Washington tracks at their connections in Harold Interlocking, the busiest railroad interchange in the country.
11 – This will be the first route expansion of the LIRR in over 100 years.
12 – By itself, the new connection will carry more customers than all but four or five commuter railroads in the country, about 160,000 per day.
13 – The MTA serves the region of the highest transit dependence in the nation; they provide more than ½ of the nation’s rail trips.
14 – During the 15 years of construction expert planning will keep the two largest commuter railroads in North America (LIRR and Metro North) plus NYC’s subway system wholly operational while tunneling under and around them.

For lots more information and some great pictures Google ‘MTA East Side Access’. Other information at ‘MTA’, ‘Metro North’, ‘Long Island Railroad’.

And I’ll end here with a short history of the song "Chattanooga Choo Choo" (which you can also Google to hear the song and see the lyrics).

The song was written by the team of Mack Gordon and Harry Warren while traveling on the Southern Railway's "Birmingham Special" train. The song tells the story of travelling from New York City to Chattanooga. However, the inspiration for the song was a small, wood-burning steam locomotive of the 2-6-0 type which belonged to the Cincinnati Southern Railroad, which is now part of the Norfolk Southern Railway system. That train is now a museum artifact. From 1880, most trains bound for America's South passed through the southeastern Tennessee city of Chattanooga, often on to the super-hub of Atlanta. The Chattanooga Choo Choo did not refer to any particular train, though some have incorrectly asserted that it referred to Louisville and Nashville's Dixie Flyer or the Southern Railway's Crescent Limited.

(Please see a couple pictures 2 forums down.)