Back in May, Amtrak invited bigs from both sides of the Hudson, Albany and D.C. to come celebrate the start of phase one construction on Moynihan Station—even Rosario Dawson, train aficionado, was there. Yet more striking than the silver screen star were the new renderings for Moynihan Station that Amtrak showed off.
Not just the banal concourses of Phase 1 that have bandied about before—nothing new there—but honest to god interiors of the grand train hall meant to restore Penn Station to its former glory inside the old Farley Post office. In a bid for both historical preservation and cost savings, the roof of the post office will no longer be ripped off and replaced with a new glass ceiling, but instead the existing one, with its massive steel trusses will be preserved.
Naturally, the very next morning, The Observer was hot on the trail of those renderings. (Really, do we care about anything else?) Sadly, one bureaucrat or press handler after another said, well, those are preliminary designs, so we’re not really ready to reveal them.
But Amtrak just did, even if it didn’t mean to, in its latest report on high-speed rail for the Northeast Corridor (coming someday, we promise, fingers crossed), which the fine folks over at WNYC’s Transportation Nation picked up. Therein lie the renderings we were after, along with a lot of other cool high-speed rail pics that will keep us dreaming until we can finally get on board.
That is set for 2025, but if Moynihan timelines are any indication, not to mention the deaths of such projects as ARC, then 2055 does not seem unreasonable.
