Railroad WI: A Union Station for New York

First, some background:

Up to the first decade of the 1900s, the New York Central & Hudson River (later just New York Central, or NYC) was the only railroad to operate a passenger terminal directly onto the island of Manhattan. The NYC's main line, following the Hudson River from the north, crossed the Harlem River and came down (later under) Park Avenue. The NYC built a succession of passenger stations, culminating in the magnificent Grand Central Terminal at 42nd Street, which still stands today. The New York, New Haven & Hartford (New Haven for short) also operated passenger trains to New England points into GCT.

The NYC's biggest competitor, the Pennsylvania Railroad, crossed New Jersey from the west and terminated across the Hudson River at Manhattan Transfer. Ferryboats were then used to take passengers across the river to Manhattan. This was obviously less convenient, and the PRR wanted to get into Manhattan proper.

The PRR was the largest of the railroads terminating across the river with ferryboat service, but there were others, with terminals at various points in Jersey City, Hoboken, and Weehawken, all with ferries linking to New York: Baltimore & Ohio; Reading; Central of New Jersey; Lehigh Valley; Erie; Delaware, Lackawanna & Western; New York, Susquehanna & Western; New York, Ontario & Western; and even the NYC itself via its West Shore line. For this post, for simplicity's sake, I'm going to refer to all the railroads in that list as the "Jersey Boys."

There were a number of efforts made at crossing the Hudson. A tunneling project was started in the 1870s but abandoned, although the tunnels were later completed for a subway system, the Hudson & Manhattan, today's PATH. Tunneling was a difficult process given the technology at the time.

The PRR tried to convince the Jersey Boys to go in together on crossing the Hudson and building a passenger terminal for joint use (a so-called "union station") on Manhattan. The original proposal was for a bridge, located roughly at Hoboken. The proposed bridge would have been multilevel and of either a suspension or cantilever design. This would have been a huge and costly prospect - twice the size of the Brooklyn Bridge. For that reason, the PRR couldn't get the Jersey Boys on board.

The PRR eventually decided to go it alone, and beginning in 1902 began constructing its tunnels under the Hudson River. The twin tunnels emerged into Manhattan in an area between 30th and 33rd Streets. They continued all the way under the island to another set of tunnels under the East River. Emerging in Queens, the PRR continued to Sunnyside Yard, where trains were serviced. The Long Island Rail Road was purchased by the PRR as a subsidiary and also used Penn Station, which the PRR built a bit earlier than the final GCT. The New Haven subsequently built a new bridge over the East River, Hell Gate Bridge, from the Bronx to Queens, that allowed its route from New England to connect with the PRR, and thereby allowed direct PRR-NH service all the way from Washington, DC to Boston (today's "Northeast Corridor").

Penn Station's location was governed by the location of the tunnels. They had to drop down low to get under the Hudson River, rise back up again so that passengers wouldn't have to descend 100 feet to board a train, and then drop down once again to get under the East River. Those grades limited where the station could go. The PRR's president, Alexander Cassatt, wanted to put Penn Station on Park Avenue, but it turned out that the tunnels at that point were sloping down to get under the East River (stopping all trains on a grade was not a great idea). His second choice was to have the station on the Hudson River, but that obviously faced the same problem. The only feasible spot for the station was at the top of the tunnel grade, at Seventh Avenue, which unfortunately put the station in a less-than-desirable neighborhood at the time.

But what if the PRR had been able to convince the Jersey Boys to participate?

The Bridge would have been, as Bill Preston Esquire and Ted "Theodore" Logan would say, most bodacious, but the problem with it is that it would then be difficult to connect with the New Haven for that through service to Boston. The best solution I could come up with would be to have The Bridge angled slightly northeastward, with the tracks landing in Manhattan around 14th Street. They would then go downgrade below street level under one of the avenues (maybe Ninth) before making a 90-degree turn somewhere midtown and heading under the East River as in OTL. This would obviously be very expensive and hard to engineer.

Let's consider a somewhat different proposal: say the PRR plus Jersey Boys decide to go with a tunnel - but it gets built about nine blocks uptown, between 39th and 42nd Streets. I've not been able to uncover exactly why the PRR chose the alignment it chose; it could be for reasons having to do with the riverbed, bedrock, width of the river, or even the cost of the properties in its way; IIRC the NYC already owned some property on the south side of 42nd Street at GCT, and they obviously weren't going to readily sell it so a competitor could build a competing train station. However, let's say that with the Jersey Boys on board, the union station railroads now have enough capital to overcome whatever costs they may incur, and let's also propose that the NYC is "persuaded" to sell (the government wouldn't have gotten involved with something like this back then, but a powerful financier like J.P. Morgan, if he liked the idea, would have been able to put the squeeze on them).

So, nine blocks north; so what? If we assume the same restrictions on the site of the station - it has to be on Seventh Avenue - that would put New York Union Station at Seventh Avenue and 42nd Street, which is to say, right at the south end of Times Square. Transferring between this station and GCT, which in OTL can be a pain, would be as easy as taking the subway shuttle from Times Square to Grand Central. The shuttle might even be extended west in TTL to the piers along the Hudson - because that's where many of the ocean liners docked. And, assuming the Lincoln Tunnel is built more or less as in OTL, that would put it right next to the railroad tunnels, meaning that the Port Authority Bus Terminal, on Eighth Avenue near 42nd, would be right across the street from the Union Station, with a concourse underground (or something) to provide a direct passenger connection.

Although, with apologies to Edward Hungerford, I don't think there's a feasible way to also work an airport into this scenario, having all those modes coming together or close by in midtown Manhattan would be tremendously convenient. And for the railfans, it would be cool to imagine that Union Station would host not only the departures of PRR's Broadway Limited, LIRR's commuter trains, and New Haven's Merchants Limited, but the B&O's Capitol Limited, the Reading's Crusader, the CNJ's Blue Comet, the LV's Black Diamond, the Erie Limited, the DL&W's Phoebe Snow, the NYS&W's commuter trains, the NYO&W's Mountaineer....

So, what do you think? Does it sound feasible, or are there financial or engineering constraints to this that I'm missing?
 
A fascinating proposition. Presumably there would still be a DD1 electric locomotive developed, but one key difference would be that the tunnel, track, locomotives, etc. would be the property of an umbrella company called something like the Manhattan Terminal Railroad. Also presumably Manhattan Transfer would be situated at or close to where it was IOTL. To be sure, there will have to be tracks built from the various Jersey Boys to the PRR's right of way, near Manhattan Transfer, but I don't see that as a deal-breaker. One other sidebar: might accelerate and widen electrification of the northeast corridor.
 
The Manhattan Terminal Railroad would have a common delivery system, voltage, etc. for electrification, so that might be an incentive to the railroads using NYUS to extend electrification. The Lehigh Valley was at one point considering electrification to Allentown and possibly as far as Wilkes-Barre, while the Pennsy was looking at electrifying west from Harrisburg all the way to Pittsburgh at one time (which creates the intriguing picture of electrics on Horseshoe Curve). in this scenario the Erie might do electrification too; I'm thinking at least to Port Jervis, New York, if not all the way to Binghamton; and the DL&W electrification might be extended from Dover NJ west, possibly as far as Scranton.
 
I don't know much about American railways, but I always wondered why a scheme wasn't thought of that involved extending the tunnels into GCT down 5th Avenue towards Chinatown, where a second Manhattan station could be built just north of the Financial District. The tracks could then rise over the East River and head south through Brooklyn, across to Staten Island then over to New Jersey, conencting onto the mainline again near New Brunswick. Of course this would have meant Newark would have been cutt off the mainline, but surely would have been a quicker and easier route to build a long bridge or the current tunnels?
 
Here is an alternate crossing of the Hudson, a tunnel under the Narrows between Brooklyn and Staten Island.

Other than the tunnels, you need bridges to connect Staten Island and New Jersey, and Queens and the Bronx, but still easier than any combination of bridges and tunnels to connect New Jersey and Midtown Manhattan. The central station is in downtown Brooklyn, where it connects to the subway system and its actually closer to the financial district than a Midtown station would be. It is also much easier to obtain rights of way at the time we are talking about building this.
 
The Brooklyn ideas are intriguing, although a Brooklyn station would be a long way from midtown (though indeed closer to the Financial District). SadSprinter's idea would have the advantage of having one major station midtown and one near Wall Street (though it would be hard to get the NYC on board with this). Also the subway connections would have to be really good for this to work. OTOH, maybe a Brooklyn station would make it possible to pull an Edward Hungerford after all, depending on where the station would be located, and built an airport on top of it after all, or at least right next door.

In OTL the B&O proposed building a tunnel from Staten Island to lower Manhattan, and also there was some talk of a railroad bridge across the Narrows (something like the OTL Verrazano Narrows Bridge but with a railroad deck).
 
A Brooklyn connection would most likely connect to the Long Island Railroad at Bay Ridge. The problem past that is that the LIRR (owned by Pennsylvania in the relevant time frame) doesn't directly run from Bay Ridge along the East River. In 1882:

So a connection from Bay Ridge would either need to take a long, looping path around Brooklyn, or you'd need to transfer to a subway, or you'd want to extend tracks along the East River coast of Brooklyn.

That might not necessarily be a bad thing--it would allow the railroads to more directly serve shipping docking along the Brooklyn coast.

A Brooklyn connection might also allow freight shipping onto/off of Long Island, which could make the LIRR profitable.
 
A plan for New Jersey terminating RR's to build a common station in Manhattan, if initiated early enough, might bring the NYC into the combine, making the PRR's purchase of the Long Island RR unnecessary. Still, things would have to be pretty surefire for the NYC to sign on. Their inclusion in a NYUS really gains them no advantage, and a failure of a NYUS plan leaves the NYC with their exclusive access to Manhattan. Why should they add their $$$ to help finance their competitor's New York terminal? Also, fail or succeed, the cost will be enormous. If enormous enough, even a successful project could have crippling costs. The NYC can avoid that risk.

The neighborhood for OTL Penn Station was, indeed, influenced by the cost/availability of property. The neighborhood was, shall we say, not the best. Also the only practical way across the island to Long Island was under city streets, not angling through private property. This meant the alignment has to be roughly in line with the Sunnyside Yard development in Long Island City.

While a cross-harbor/Brooklyn/Manhattan plan was once suggested, the water crossing would have been by car float, not bridge or tunnel. Possibly a joint effort might have been willing to attempt the longer tunnel under the Narrows.
 
Another issue that occurs to me about the Brooklyn configuration, as I think about it, is that the connecting New Jersey railroads were by and large further north than Staten Island, meaning that (for example) trains coming in from the Erie Railroad would have to go a considerable distance out of their way. The stretch of Bayonne-Jersey City-Hoboken-Weehawken provides a much more direct connection, even with the difficulties involved in any Hudson River crossing.
 
I don't think there's a feasible way to also work an airport into this scenario
Really? Probably not originally, but the original AirTrain plan was to continue up the Van Dyck to La Guardia (this possibility of connecting the two being the reason I actually kind of like the Current La Guardia AirTrain plan) and then across the Queensboro. The shuttle was literally the first railroad in the world to be automated, and I rather suspect that this arrangement would make it a no brainer to fully build out AirTrain.

OTOH Hudson and Manhattan is going to look different with this arrangement as well, so I wonder if AirTrain might be better suited to being an extension of PATH somehow. I'd quite like to see the H&M as a third partner in the Dual Contracts, though handing the shuttle over to them doesn't seem likely or all that feasible technically the prospect of PATH eventually runnning a line from Newark Airport though (Penn/Grand Central) and on to La Guardia and ending at JFK makes my mouth water... I'd point out the original H&M plans and contemplate what happens if the Dual Contracts included a Hudson and Manhattan East River tunnel (Atlantic Avenue conversion and extension to Jamaica at some point, link to Flatbush for now?) and Third Ave subway...

All that said, the idea that's been in the back of my head has always been an early B&O/NYC merger creating a central Manhattan mainline such that Grand Central is a through station, connecting to a lower Manhattan terminal and continuing south to around the Jersey City Terminal or Staten Island. Bar the PRR ownership an east river tunnel from the Flatbush Terminal would be tempting as well, though that makes me want to work in provision for east/west through running through lower Manhattan I have a hard to picturing the feasibility of (short of turning the entire tip of the island into a railroad junction).
 
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I was thinking more of Edward Hungerford's circa-1945 idea of building a "Grand Central West" around 63rd Street near the Hudson that would have incorporated the New Jersey-terminating railroads as well. He depicted an airport, or at least a heliport, on the roof of the complex, with the runways extending north from 63rd Street. Even considering that he was thinking in terms of DC-3's rather than jets, it's hard to imagine New York accepting an airport so close to the heart of midtown Manhattan. Shuttles to Newark, LaGuardia and Idlewild (JFK) are totally doable, however, in the scenario I came up with.
 
I was thinking more of Edward Hungerford's circa-1945 idea of building a "Grand Central West" around 63rd Street near the Hudson that would have incorporated the New Jersey-terminating railroads as well. He depicted an airport, or at least a heliport, on the roof of the complex, with the runways extending north from 63rd Street. Even considering that he was thinking in terms of DC-3's rather than jets, it's hard to imagine New York accepting an airport so close to the heart of midtown Manhattan. Shuttles to Newark, LaGuardia and Idlewild (JFK) are totally doable, however, in the scenario I came up with.

There's always the Pan Am building heliport, also right in the middle of this...
 
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