How to end mad dash for trains at Penn Station? Some see hope in through-running

By 5 p.m. last Tuesday, 83-year-old Susan Grossman had already positioned herself in front of a digital departure board on Penn Station’s east end, waiting for a track assignment for her 5:16 Babylon train. As the minutes ticked by without her track being announced, the rush hour crowd grew thicker and the Bay Shore resident grew more anxious.

"I would like to know by now where I’m going," said Grossman, who was heading home after attending the U.S. Open tennis tournament in Queens.

With less than 10 minutes to spare before her train would depart, it finally appeared: Track 17. Grossman gingerly made her way through the crush of commuters down the stairs onto a narrow station platform, boarding her train moments before it pulled away.

"I’m frustrated," she said before disappearing into the crowd.

That frustration is shared by thousands of Long Island Rail Road commuters who regularly endure the chaos at Penn when tracks are announced close to departure times. Now, momentum is building for a long-debated strategy to alleviate the mad dash to track level by no longer treating Penn as a dead end.

Despite being considered the busiest train terminal in North America, Penn Station really isn’t a train terminal at all, as most of its tracks continue beyond the facility, across the Hudson River, and into New Jersey. But, because trains typically begin or end their runs at Penn, they tend to dwell at platforms for several minutes at a time — blocking other trains from using those tracks until they pull out.

Under a through-running operation, as it’s known in the transit industry, trains that today end their runs at Penn Station — and wait on tracks to be cleared of passengers and serviced by crews before moving  to a rail yard or heading back on a round  trip — would instead quickly move on from Penn, bound for the next station on the other side of the Hudson or East rivers. Westbound LIRR trains would continue to stations in New Jersey, and  NJ Transit trains would continue to LIRR stations in Queens and Long Island.

Proponents say such an operation — especially when combined with other infrastructure improvements — could boost train capacity and efficiency at Penn, making for a more orderly flow of trains and fewer last-minute stampedes to track level.

"Through-running gives you just a very streamlined way to come in, get people on and off the trains quickly, and then also reduce the time between trains," said Samuel Turvey, chairperson of ReThinkNYC, a nonprofit planning group that has long advocated for through-running at Penn Station. "It completely streamlines and modernizes the way trains run through the station."

But plentiful skepticism remains over the potential for through-running to make much of a difference at Penn and whether there is sufficient demand for one-seat rides from Seaford to Secaucus, New Jersey,  or from Newark to New Hyde Park to make the operational overhaul worthwhile.

Through-running boosters are seizing on the opportunity presented by the ongoing transformation of Manhattan’s rail system, including the construction of the new Gateway tunnel that will double train capacity across the Hudson River and the Trump administration’s $8 billion effort to reconstruct Penn Station.

The Federal Railroad Administration, as part of an ongoing Penn Station "service optimization study," last month acknowledged the potential to reduce trains’ dwell times by running them "through the station rather than terminating them at the station and turning them on the platform."

At a recent panel discussion about the potential for through-running at Penn, Amtrak special adviser Andy Byford, who is heading up the Penn redevelopment effort, promised to give the idea a serious look, noting the appeal of doing away with the "last-minute stampede to the train."

But Byford also acknowledged "practical and logistical challenges" in the way of bringing wide-scale through-running to Penn Station. Some of those challenges were addressed in an April study by the Regional Plan Association, a nonprofit planning group. RPA president and CEO Tom Wright, in an interview, said "through-running does very little to solve" Penn’s capacity constraints and could make them worse, in part because the same train that unloads LIRR passengers at Penn Station would also have to wait for new passengers to board on their way to New Jersey.

Wright pointed to other major hurdles, including that Amtrak, NJ Transit, the LIRR and Metro-North, which is coming to Penn in 2030, would have to figure out how to reconcile incompatible train equipment and negotiate agreements with the various unions that would operate the trains.

Wright said infrastructure upgrades associated with through-running could improve Penn’s operation — including wider platforms and more track level stairs and escalators to allow for more orderly loading and unloading of passengers. But they need not be tied to through-running, especially given the vast majority of commuters in the region are heading for Penn.

"The lion's share of the jobs in the region are around in lower Manhattan, west midtown around Penn Station or east midtown around Grand Central," Wright said. "Yes, it would be great to promote more job growth in those subcenters and get them up. But ... it’s going to be a very, very long time before that demand really materializes."

LIRR president Rob Free said while he believes through-running "is a good idea in theory," it's hamstrung by infrastructure limitations that could add to existing congestion and conflicts if other railroads used tracks and tunnels typically reserved for the LIRR and vice versa. 

Because the LIRR already runs the most trains out of Penn and clears trains from tracks more quickly and efficiently than other railroads, Free questioned whether the LIRR stands to gain as much from through-running as Amtrak and NJ Transit, which are looking to increase their capacity at Penn as their volume across the Hudson River doubles with the construction of the new $16 billion Gateway tunnel, scheduled to be completed by 2035.

Free said other upgrades at Penn Station could make more of a difference in easing LIRR commutes than through-running, including a reconfigured layout that would allow for easier access to all tracks from anywhere in the station.

"I'm not doing this to throw shade on it. It just needs further analysis. It needs to be really looked at," Free said. "We'll participate as much as we can, as long as there's a benefit to improving our service and our reliability."

Expanding capacity at Penn Station, some through-running skeptics believe, will require expanding Penn itself, potentially by annexing the block south of the facility to build additional tracks. Such a proposal for a "Penn South" was initially advanced by former Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo in 2020, before being tabled by his successor, Kathy Hochul, amid outcry among businesses and residents that would be displaced and uncertainty over a funding plan for the project.

Through-running proponents, such as Turvey, believe the demand for train service beyond Penn Station is significant, including from commuters currently driving to jobs in New Jersey. And he believes other logistical issues can be sorted out with enough time and commitment by the various players, including the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, the LIRR’s parent organization.

Turvey’s immediate priority is to have Penn’s railroads and the FRA conduct computerized "rail traffic control" simulations that he believes will prove through-running could work, as it already has in other cities that have adopted it, including Philadelphia, Paris and London.

"We can prove out just how wonderful this can be," Turvey said during a recent interview at Penn Station during the height of the evening rush. "We think we’re talking about a magnum leap in how the station would operate."

While stopping short of committing to through-running, Amtrak, which owns Penn, has said its redevelopment effort will "extract every ounce of additional capacity out of Penn’s existing footprint." That includes plans to knock down the Infosys Theater at Madison Square Garden above Penn Station, allowing for several support columns to be removed and creating more space on platforms.