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Amtrak special adviser Andy Byford has a station to sell you.
Byford, once known to New Yorkers as “Train Daddy,” has spent the last month traveling up and down the East Coast seeking buy-in for the Trump administration’s plan to rebuild Penn Station. He’s met with federal officials in Washington. He’s gotten NJ Transit CEO Kris Kolluri to partner on the project. He presented the plan to New York Gov. Kathy Hochul, as well as every elected official who represents the area around Penn Station.
But Byford hasn’t managed to secure a meeting with one of Manhattan’s most powerful figures: MTA Chair Janno Lieber.
The two are at odds over the project, which Lieber led until President Donald Trump seized control of the effort last year and turned the work over to Amtrak. Byford wants the MTA to sign an agreement that would make the agency a partner (which hasn’t been made public) before showing Lieber and his team the full scope of Amtrak’s plans for the station.
Lieber has repeatedly declined to agree to the deal. By his telling, doing so would give up the leverage the MTA has over Penn Station through its lease.
Byford visited WNYC’s newsroom on Wednesday for an appearance on “The Brian Lehrer Show,” where he called for an end to his standoff with Lieber and the MTA.
“If we just focus on the endgame, which is, we think we all want the same thing, right? For all of our customers, we want this to be a transformed station,” said Byford. “Clearly there’s got to be a bit of flexibility there and we’ve had it in the past.”
“I hope that we can get common sense to prevail … Just work with us.”
His remarks came a week after a public back-and-forth with Lieber. After Byford wrote a letter asking Lieber to sign the MTA on as “fully involved” partners on the Penn Station plan, the New York transit executive responded with his own letter that called Amtrak’s process “bizarre.” Lieber wrote that “there’s no point in rebutting all the blah-blah” about Byford’s previous efforts to get the MTA to sign on to the project.
“Obviously you have to have an agreement in order to talk about how you’re going to work together. But that lease would not be impacted by the [memorandum of agreement] that we’ve tabled,” Byford said during his WNYC appearance. “There is a specific paragraph that safeguards that.”
It still remains unclear why Amtrak needs a written agreement just to sit down with the MTA.
Lieber last week said he and his team had not yet been given a meeting to look at the design and engineering plans, even though Hochul — who controls the MTA — was already briefed on the top-line details.
State Sen. Liz Krueger said in an interview that Byford and the private developers behind the Penn Station project held a meeting last month with elected officials in Midtown, including City Councilmember Carl Wilson, Assemblymember Tony Simone, Manhattan Borough President Brad Hoylman-Sigal, and the chiefs of staff for both New York State Sen. Erik Bottcher and Rep. Jerry Nadler.
Krueger said they all raised similar concerns over how the project would be funded — and how much control private developers and the real estate firm Vornado would have over the reconstructed Penn Station.
Krueger pinned the MTA’s reluctance to meet with Byford on Hochul.
“[Amtrak] says Janno refuses to come to the table… I go, ‘The MTA works for the governor. I’m pretty sure the MTA isn’t signing anything because the governor told them not to sign anything,’ which, by the way, I still believe is true,” Krueger said.
Byford is under the direction of the Trump administration to begin construction of the project by the end of 2027. Byford said he will move forward with or without MTA approval. And even if Amtrak secures funding and an expedited environmental review for the work, the New York transit agency could still sue Amtrak in an effort to shut it down.
In the meantime, Train Daddy is back in Manhattan — and plans to meet with elected officials every month while he tries to rebuild the country’s busiest train station.
Jimmy Vielkind contributed reporting to this column.
NYC transportation news this week
The MTA rolls out new subway cars on the D line. MTA officials announced this week that they will begin rolling out modern subway cars on the D line, replacing breakdown-prone trains dating back to the 1980s.
FAA investigates after JetBlue plane reports hitting drone near JFK. A JetBlue flight struck a drone while approaching JFK Airport on Monday morning, according to the Federal Aviation Administration, which said it is investigating the incident.
New York City’s garbage plan moves forward. According to documents published this week, New York City’s Department of Sanitation plans to replace nearly 30,000 parking spaces with “Empire Bin” trash containers over the next six years in order to eradicate piles of trash bags from sidewalks.
Curious Commuter
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Question from Greg in Queens
How is New York City’s transportation system holding up this summer with the World Cup in town?
Answer
The subways are on an international stage thanks to tourists from around the world coming to town for the World Cup games in New Jersey. And — knock on wood — we haven’t seen the type of service meltdowns New Yorkers are used to. Last June and July, “major incidents” — or ones that delay at least 50 trains — on the subways spiked to their highest levels since 2018. But data shows things are running a hell of a lot smoother this year. The MTA has invested billions in state-of-good-repair work to upgrade aging infrastructure responsible for many of last year’s delays. But the transit agency should also thank the heavens. Last year, the city was hit by repeated rainstorms that flooded the subway system and damaged equipment. We haven’t seen that type of weather so far this summer.
