NYC Penn Station documentary on PBS Tuesday

As posted the tunnels, the tracks, and the original platforms are in busy daily use to this day.  As noted in the book, The Late Great Pennsylvania Station, the destruction of Penn Station had to be done in (3) overlapping phases; I, tearing down the old Penn Station, II, assembling, and the new Penn Station, and III, construction of Madision Square Garden.  All this had to be done while trains still ran into and out of the station.

One of the ironies of the old Penn Station is that in any other number of American cities in the early 1960's if a developer wanted to buy, and tear down their large train stations (Buffalo, Detroit, St. Louis, etc and so on) there would have been no issue, as their volume of trains had already sunk to very low levels.

Penn Station remained busy even in the low point of inter-city train travel (in the Northeast). By the 50's, 60's there were fewer intercity trains running into Penn, BUT by then The Pennsylvania had already moved most of their NJ commuter operations to Penn. When Penn was built, the PRR kept their commuter trains based at their Jersey City station. Starting with the completion of their electrification program in the 30's they started moving these trains to penn, and by 1961 all commuter trains ran into and out of Penn.

Ken  

considering the tunnels themselves are over 100 years old and see nearly 30 trains per hour during the rush periods, they are in remarkably good shape, though I'm sure Amtrak makes sure that is the case, even with their historic limited budgets.

what is surprising is the tunnels tubes themselves rise and fall inches in the river silt with the tide fall in the North River (based on how much water pressure is above). this was discovered soon after their completion. the PRR engineers considered some options to control this but decided to leave it alone. it is documented in both books on the subject: The Late, Great Penn Station & Conquering Gotham.

One of the problems with the current tubes is it is very difficult to shut them down to do any kind of repair, plus being built in the early 1900's, there are issues with ventilation in the tunnels and especially if an emergency happened due to fire or God forbid terrorist activity, it would be very difficult to get people out of there and/or protect them. A lot of work has been done on the tunnels, in part because since the mid 1990's, New Jersey transit trains that once ended in Hoboken now use the tunnels so there is money to work on them...

The real problem as someone who has ridden the trains on a daily basis and still rides them from time to time, is that the tunnels are at capacity, and there is pent up demand for more train service. With the limitations on the tunnels, trains coming in, even though they are using double decker cars now, mean that trains are SRO and also that the commute is a lot longer simply because of congestion into Penn Station, and one person I knew who worked for Amtrak said they would love to have more train capability into NY Penn, because the regional and Accela trains are very, very busy and it is one of the few parts of the Amtrak system where demand often exceeds ability to provide service. 

It isn't just the tunnels, Penn Station itself the way it is now is not conducive to operations, Penn probably has more traffic and trains then it did in its heyday between the LIRR and NJT and Amtrak, and I can attest to the fact that getting off the platforms and to where you need to go takes a lot of time, it adds 15-20 minutes to your commute.I think it handles something like 500,000 people a day coming in on 1200 trains, and that is a lot of people (it handles more people a day than I believe all 3 NY airports combined).