Management decisions at Amtrak have led to repeated delays to the opening of a new Metro-North connection between Penn Station and the east Bronx, the MTA's fed-up chief executive said on Monday.
Asked at a press conference about the status of the "Penn Access" project after the feds put two key transit projects on hold last week, MTA Chairman and CEO Janno Lieber lit into Amtrak in an extended tirade pointedly directed at the railroad rather than the Trump administration.
"Amtrak's delays of the Penn Access project have nothing to do with what's going on with Congress or the White House. It's just Amtrak being Amtrak," Lieber said at a press conference in the Bronx.
The effort to bring four Metro-North stops to the Bronx neighborhoods of Co-op City, Morris Park, Parkchester/Van Nest and Hunts Point relies on the MTA expanding an Amtrak-owned right-of-way from two to four tracks. But Amtrak has repeatedly failed to hold up its end of contract agreements with the MTA — forcing costly delays to the project, Lieber told reporters.
"They slow us down every day of the week by not giving outages which were promised in contracts," Lieber explained. "It's their right-of-way and we need their supervisory personnel to stand there and watch us do work. Their people don't show up, and we can't get work done.
"The people in Co-op City are waiting for a goddamn train and its outrageous and it's been a problem from the start of the project," he added.
Lieber's comments are the harshest words an MTA executive has had for Amtrak since the Metro-North expansion project broke ground in 2022.
MTA officials have blamed the federally owned private railroad for delays to the project on at least two previous occasions, and for similar reasons to the ones that Lieber laid out on Monday.
In 2023, the MTA said that work was up to nine months behind schedule because Amtrak did not give the agency sufficient access to the tracks on its Hell Gate line. The MTA and Amtrak then came to an agreement to provide more track access and allow the agency to make up for lost time — but earlier this year, officials pushed back the project's completion date from 2027 to 2028 for the same reason of a lack of track access. Because track access is controlled by Amtrak, it is supposed to be on the hook for cost overruns on the $3.2-billion project that stem from a lack of said access.
The Penn Access project has the potential to transform the east Bronx by bringing direct, fast transit access to Midtown to an area where the only other rapid transit option is the 6 train. Roughly 500,000 residents live within one mile of the stations included in the project, and the commuter rail service is predicted to cut commute times by 50 minutes. In anticipation of the increased transit service, the city rezoned the areas around two of the upcoming stations last year to allow for more housing and take advantage of the fact that the new transit link will open up better commutes to Manhattan and Connecticut.
But the project needs to get finished before it can improve the lives of New Yorkers (or Nutmeggers, for that matter).
The MTA has been studying the idea of bringing Metro-North service to the east Bronx since 1999, but Penn Access wasn't funded in a capital plan until the 2015-2019 reconstruction effort, and the project didn't break ground until 2022 after a COVID-related pause on MTA capital work.
The MTA has promised a more granular update to the status of Penn Access at its October board meetings. Until then, Lieber said, the agency is not exploring legal options to get its contractually obligated track access from Amtrak, opting to rely on regular diplomacy instead of a big gavel.
"We're asking Amtrak to make good on their promises and at least to give us additional access and capacity to make up some of the time," Lieber said. "Those discussions are underway. So far they haven't yielded much."
A spokesperson for Amtrak accused Lieber of spreading "misinformation."
"Amtrak is, and has been, a dedicated partner on the Penn Access project, mitigating early delays and more than doubling the planned, contracted-committed, labor support for the projects and significantly more outages than planned," Amtrak rep Jason Abrams said in. a statement.
"Amtrak remains committed to being a professional and collaborative partner and working with MTA ... focusing on the facts and productive collaboration as the most effective way to advance the project and serve New York City residents."
