[title]
For some Amtrak riders, there may be a light at the end of the crumbling tunnel.
Anyone coming into the city on an Amtrak train currently has to arrive at Penn Station. You may be familiar with this particular transit hub as the land of sewage waterfalls and existential crisis-inducing delays. While those two lovely features weren’t enough on their own to convince officials that another New York entryway may be worth exploring, this summer’s planned construction work, set to cause weeks of service disruptions, apparently is.
According to Politico, Governor Cuomo is in talks with Amtrak officials to reroute some of 12 trains that run each weekday from Penn Station to Grand Central Terminal. That will certainly come as a relief to those passengers, whose commutes will now terminate at a Beaux-Arts landmark with its own Apple store rather than amid the rat-infested depths of the seventh circle of Transit Hell.
The exact timing of the switch, along with its duration, has yet to be decided, but it will surely coincide with this summer’s scheduled track work for Penn Station. Amtrak president and CEO Wick Moorman has previously announced that those repairs are scheduled to take place over roughly three weeks in July and three weeks in August.
All signs point to the switch definitely happening, however. Amtrak crews are already training to bring trains in and out of Grand Central Terminal. In fact, running trains out of the east side terminal won't be an entirely new occurrence. Amtrak previously used Grand Central for some of its routes up until 1991 when it moved its operations across town to Penn.