After decades of planning, the rebuilding of America’s busiest train station, Pennsylvania Station in New York City, will begin in about two years, federal transportation officials said on Wednesday.
Sean P. Duffy, the federal transportation secretary, and Andy Byford, the Amtrak executive whom the Trump administration recently put in charge of the project, planned to lay out that ambitious goal at a news conference on Wednesday afternoon, transportation officials said.
After taking control of the project this spring, Amtrak intends to partner with a private developer to renovate the dingy station, which sits beneath Madison Square Garden in Midtown Manhattan, on an accelerated schedule, the officials said. Under the new timeline, construction would begin by the end of 2027, they said.
But it was not clear how much the long-overdue overhaul would cost or who would pay for it. Amtrak owns the station, but its primary users are NJ Transit and New York’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority.
Earlier on Wednesday, Mr. Duffy announced that the Trump administration would take control of Union Station in Washington, D.C. That station, the second busiest on Amtrak’s national network, is owned by the U.S. Department of Transportation and controlled by Amtrak.
Still, Mr. Duffy told Fox Business in an interview on Wednesday that the administration was going to take the station back. “We’re going to drive out the homelessness, we’re going to drive out the crime,” he said.
Amtrak put out a call last week for companies that might be interested in serving as the master developer for the “transformation” of Penn Station. The new timeline calls for a formal solicitation of prospective developers in October.
Federal officials took the reins of the Penn Station overhaul in April, wresting control from New York’s governor, Kathy Hochul, who had promised to transform it into a “world-class” transit hub. The M.T.A., which operates the city’s subways and two commuter railroads, had spent nearly four years working on a redesign of the station that it estimated would cost about $7 billion.
“We were actually making pretty good progress” on that design, said Janno Lieber, the chief executive of the transportation authority. He said that he did not know what the federal authorities would do now.
Ms. Hochul had pledged more than $1 billion toward the latest plan for the station. But she withdrew that commitment when the Trump administration handed control of the project to Amtrak.
Penn Station is overcrowded, serving far more commuters than its 21 tracks and narrow passageways were originally designed to handle. Along with being modernized, it needs to be redesigned to handle more trains.
Construction of two additional rail tunnels under the Hudson River — a project known as Gateway — has begun. Those tunnels could eventually double the number of trains that pass under the river to Penn Station.
Amtrak had proposed demolishing a fully developed block south of the station to make room for an expansion. But that scheme has run into concerted opposition from community groups and has lost the support of the governor.
Critics of that plan have proposed that commuter trains travel through Penn Station instead of ending their routes in Manhattan. Amtrak and the other railroads that use the station had opposed that concept, known as “through-running.” But Mr. Byford has expressed support for the idea and federal officials have said they would study it anew.
Patrick McGeehan is a Times reporter who covers the economy of New York City and its airports and other transportation hubs.
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