NEW YORK — Looking to catch the Long Island Rail Road at New York City’s newest commuter rail station for the holiday season? Well, it doesn’t look like that’s going to happen.
Despite a longstanding promise to open in December, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority said Grand Central Madison won’t debut on time following all. That’s because testing of the safety system hasn’t been completed yet, according to Jamie Torres-Springer, MTA president of construction and development.
“As outlined at the MTA Board meeting last week, the opening of Grand Central Madison and Long Island Rail Road GCM service is contingent on the completion of system testing, in line with our commitment to safety. One particular area in the 700,000 square foot terminal requires additional work that will take more than a few days.Given the logistics of completing testing and launch service, we have informed MTA Chairman Janno Lieber that the terminal will not open this week,” Torres-Springer said in a statement.
So when will the expensive new expansion open? Torres-Springer said the transit authority is aiming for a January debut.
That means that for those who have been waiting (and waiting and waiting…) for the new station on the east side of midtown Manhattan, the wait will be a little longer.
The Federal Railroad Administration announced in November that it had approved the project that will connect Long Island Rail Road to a new station near Grand Central Terminal, providing direct LIRR service to a new concourse below the established transit hub.
The MTA said the $11 billion project will increase service by 41 percent on the LIRR, adding regarding 274 trains every weekday. The morning peak might go from 113 trains to 158, and the followingnoon peak from 98 trains to 158. A new schedule for the trains is expected to be released soon.
In April, our sister chain NBC New York got an exclusive look inside the project’s terminal that will allow LIRR riders to have shorter trips. Located hundreds of feet below Grand Central, the new terminal aims to bring 60 percent more traffic to Manhattan from Long Island at peak hours, with the added benefit of reducing congestion at Penn Station at peak hours.
“The physical structure is almost complete,” MTA President Janno Lieber told News 4 at the time, adding that the end is in sight.
Crews had already polished the columns, tested the fire alarms and powered up the control room in one of the largest infrastructure projects in history. The big expense pays off, according to Lieber.
“The value of that lost time is many, many millions,” he said at the time.
The construction is one of the largest transportation infrastructure projects completed in the United States in recent years, according to the MTA. It is the largest new train terminal built in the United States since the 1950s and the first expansion to the LIRR in more than 100 years.
The project encompasses work at multiple locations in Manhattan and Queens, and includes more than eight miles of tunnels. It will bring all 11 branches of the LIRR through a new East River tunnel with a final destination below current Grand Central. This new route will save precious time for travelers heading to the East Side.
“This is the first time in 30 years that we have looked at the schedules [del LIRR]said LIRR President Cathy Rinaldi.
The project is one component of the broader expansion of the LIRR system to help reduce commuter congestion, rail congestion, and automobile traffic, and to provide connections to regional transportation such as Metro North Railroad and the undergrounds of New York City Transit. East Side Access will also reduce train and passenger congestion at New York Penn Station and neighboring subway stations.
The project will allow the number of LIRR trains in Manhattan to double with up to 24 trains per hour, while cutting travel time by 40 minutes, according to Cuomo. He said travelers will now have two stations to enter.
The new project will also allow people to reach JFK from Grand Central in 40 minutes.
The Manhattan concourse includes a 350,000-square-foot LIRR passenger concourse just below street level in the Grand Central area that will offer new entrances along Madison Avenue, 25 retail stores, Wi-Fi and cell service, new art installations, and digital signage with real-time train information. Entry is expected at 347 Madison Avenue which is being built in 45th Street as part of the remodeling of the old MTA headquarters, it serves 10,000 people per day.
When finished, East Side Access, which has been in the works for years and is scheduled to serve approximately 162,000 customers a day, according to the MTA.
“When I came to the MTA in 2018, one of my first actions was to do a deep review of East Side Access“, previously said Janno Lieber, president of MTA Construction & Development. “We doubled down on this project, expressing faith in its fundamentals but reviewing the way we were doing it. In the past, when faced with challenges, the response was to push back the completion date of the project. We ended that and committed this project would be completed in 2022 as promised”.