100 YEARS OF RAIL AND THE FUTURE OF MOYNIHAN STATION
The city that never sleeps is a busy place. In fact, with 9.5 million annual riders, busy is an understatement. Today, as we acknowledge the 100thanniversary of the James Farley Post Office Building – a building with a strong connection to rail history, we want to take a moment to share our plans for bringing rail back to this iconic New York City location.
The Farley Building opened in 1914, and since then has housed an active post office and at one point, was the intersection of rail and mail. Fast-forward about 75 years to the '90s when the now late Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan sparked discussions about the Farley Building becoming the location for rail expansion in NYC. Years later, his vision is close to becoming a reality.
Designed by the same architects as the original Penn Station (pre-Madison Square Garden), expansion of rail service to the Farley Building would recreate an elegant intercity passenger facility suitable for the busiest station in the nation.
The vision is Moynihan Station, a renovated, bigger and brighter intersection of Northeast Corridor rail transportation. Now under construction, the first phase of the project includes expansion of existing Penn Station concourses at the west end of the station, new entrances to the Farley Building at the corners of 8th Avenue and 31st and 33rd Streets, and important emergency ventilation work. This phase will open to the public in August 2016. The second phase of the project will create a grand train hall in the historic mail sorting room of the Farley Building, moving Amtrak passenger services, ticketing, and baggage check from Penn Station to the Moynihan Station. Once completed, this new facility would provide immediate benefits to not only Amtrak riders and other Penn Station commuters, but would act as a grand civic space in the rapidly developing Far West Side of Manhattan.
For more information about our improvement projects and continued investment along the Northeast Corridor, visit our Northeast Corridor website, nec.amtrak.com.
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Oh how unreal, actual proof that history does repeat itself. A story of monumental avarice, political tomfoolery and greed, at the behest of the Democratic power structure (1933-1979) that intentionally destroyed full service commercial railroading in the United States, because they could not control the railroad companies and northeastern businesses in the political manner they wanted, and because the Union Bosses who supported them demanded their blood price.
In 1963 Robert F. Wagner was the titular head of the debacle when the NY Times opined, "[P]eople who destroy public works of art deserve what they have wrought of their destruction," (paraphrased). Wagner forced thru intermediaries, the sale of PRR's "Air Rights" over the tracks and Service Platforms and the great station was torn down and replaced by a sleazy coliseum like entertainment arena of competitive sport, and blood sport.
The Great Depression did not harm the railroads as badly as most of the rest of America, while they were forced to curtail some work in 1929-30 some projects like the Northeast Corridor (Pennsylvania Railroads' old 'Broadway') electrification which was completed with Federal CCC Loans, and Roosevelt thought he had them under his thumb, but the PRR paid the note in full in 1938. During WWII the Federal Government floated 900 billion in debt to the railroad industry, when the war ended in 1945 the Democratic Administration and Congress refused to do more than pay debt service and costs against the debt, and President Truman thanked them for their forbearance by making a deal with Big Union Labor that bankrupted many smaller railroads and hammered even the largest of them. From that point on the end was certain, though the date was not set in stone. The 1968 merger of the PRR & the NYC, orchestrated by the corrupt ICC a political hammer used since Cleveland's time, forcing the two railroads, the bankrupt PRR and the marginal NYC to except responsibility for the desperately bankrupt NY, NH, & H to allow the merger set that date in stone June 30th, 1969.
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