alternatehistory.com

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?
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