New Metro-North rail service to Penn Station postponed by seven months

A $2.9 billion project to extend Metro-North Railroad service into New York City’s Penn Station has been delayed by about seven months, Metropolitan Transportation Authority officials said Monday.

The hold up is because the MTA relies on the owner of the existing tracks, Amtrak, to allow access to those lines during construction. While the MTA has a deal with Amtrak to open up the tracks and provide staffing, it has yet to fully deliver on that commitment, Jamie Torres-Springer, president of the MTA’s Construction & Development, said Monday during a monthly committee meeting.

“They have been unable to live up to this agreement to date, and we have ensured that they have been on notice of that, Torres-Springer said during the meeting. “The good news is that Amtrak acknowledges these problems and in part, due to that strong agreement that we negotiated with them, they’re working collaboratively with us on a recovery schedule.”

Metro-North operates through Grand Central Terminal on Manhattan’s east side. The Penn Station Access project is now set to finish October 2027 instead of March of that year. It will shorten commute times by about 50 minutes each way and connect the East Bronx, New York City’s northern suburbs and Connecticut to Manhattan’s west side. 

The project includes building four new accessible stations in the Bronx and upgrade Amtrak’s Hell Gate line. Amtrak didn’t have an immediate response to the MTA’s comments on the delays.

The MTA, the largest US public transit agency, wants to avoid potential cost overruns. A similar problem with Amtrak resulted in about $1 billion of additional expense to bring Long Island Rail Road service to Grand Central, which began last week, Janno Lieber, the MTA’s chief executive officer, said during the meeting.

That project, called East Side Access, required the MTA to rebuild Harold Interlocking in Queens, the nation’s busiest rail interlocking and part of Amtrak’s Northeast Corridor line.

“We have delay,” Lieber said. “We have a repeat of that Harold Interlocking dynamic, but we have legal rights and none of us wants to exercise them. Amtrak is our partner and in fairness they’ve been trying to improve.”