Amtrak President Wick Moorman announced a series of initiatives to strengthen the railway infrastructure and improve operations and preparedness at New York Penn Station, the country’s busiest rail station and transport facility.
The Penn Station Improvement Initiatives include major track and switch renewal projects in Penn Station, beginning with the western portion of the station area. The first set of projects will occur in the area of tracks and switches known as “A Interlocking,” which serves as the critical sorting mechanism routing trains that enter Penn Station from the Hudson River tunnels and the Long Island Rail Road’s West Side Yard to the various station tracks and platforms.
Under the project, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority CEO Tom Prendergast will review the interaction, coordination and collaboration between the railways’ various passenger concourses within Penn Station. The review will focus on the current methods of managing daily operations.
Amtrak is proposing that the three railways serving Penn Station develop a joint station concourse operations center that brings together the managers of the various Penn Station concourses and technology to strengthen coordination, enhance the passenger experience and improve our responses to disruptions, incidents and other events that occur anywhere in the station.
While the tracks and other rail operational elements of Penn Station are controlled at the Penn Station Control Center facility, which brings together all three railways in various capacities, management of the station’s passenger concourses lacks a similarly integrated facility to promote information-sharing, joint decision-making and the leveraging of technology. Amtrak will be seeking the support of LIRR and NJT to jointly plan, develop and staff a new facility at Penn Station and will use the results of the Penn Station Passenger Concourse Coordination Review to further inform these efforts.
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