Grand Central Madison Station

Grand Central Madison is a commuter rail terminal for the Long Island Rail Road (LIRR) in the Midtown East neighborhood of Manhattan in New York City. Part of the East Side Access project, the new terminal started construction in 2008 and is to open in December 2022. Sometimes called the LIRR's East Side station, it sits beneath Grand Central Terminal, which serves the MTA's Metro-North Railroad.

Grand Central Madison was built to reduce travel times to and from Manhattan's east side and to ease congestion at Penn Station, the west side station where the LIRR has terminated since 1910. The new terminal will enable passengers to transfer to the Metro-North Railroad's Harlem, Hudson, and New Haven Lines and the New York City Subway at Grand Central–42nd Street station.

Services

The station will serve the Long Island Rail Road's Main Line, which connects to all passenger branches and almost all stations.

Passengers traveling to and from non-electrified portions of the LIRR system (e.g., Oyster Bay or Port Jefferson) must transfer trains because the bilevel C3 coaches used in non-electrified areas cannot fit through the 63rd Street Tunnel.

History

Formal proposals to bring Long Island Rail Road trains to the east side of Manhattan date to 1963. In 1968, the 63rd Street Tunnel and a LIRR "Metropolitan Transportation Center" at 48th Street and Third Avenue were proposed as part of the Program for Action. After people living near the proposed transportation center objected, the MTA's board of directors voted to route LIRR trains to Grand Central by 1977. But the LIRR project was postponed indefinitely during the 1975 New York City fiscal crisis.

The East Side Access project was restarted after a study in the 1990s showed that more than half of LIRR riders work closer to Grand Central than to Penn Station. The cost of the project, estimated at $4.4 billion in 2004, jumped to $6.4 billion in 2006 and to $11.1 billion by 2017. The new stations and tunnels are to begin service in December 2022.

The MTA originally planned to build and open entrances at 44th, 45th, 47th, and 48th Streets. The station would connect to existing entrances at Grand Central North. The new LIRR station would also contain entrances at 335 Madison Avenue, near the southeast corner with 44th Street; at 270 Park Avenue and 280 Park Avenue near 47th and 48th–49th Streets, respectively; and at 347 Madison Avenue, on the east side of the avenue at 45th Street. An entrance on 46th Street between Lexington and Park Avenue was also built, connecting with Grand Central North. However, the MTA later announced its intent to defer construction of an entrance at 48th Street because the owner of 415 Madison Avenue wanted to undertake a major construction project on the site. The MTA would also connect the new station to the existing 47th Street cross-passage. The escalators would be up to long and descend more than . The escalators and elevators would be among the few privately operated escalators and elevators in the MTA system.

In May 2022, MTA announced that the station would be named Grand Central Madison because it sits under Grand Central Terminal and the "Madison Avenue corridor". The LIRR received operational control of the Grand Central Madison station on December 9, 2022, upon which the station and tracks became subject to Federal Railroad Administration regulations.

Station layout

The station has an area of , including for passengers and of retail space.

Concourse

The retail and dining concourse, called the Madison Concourse, will be accessed from street level or the Metro-North terminal via stairwells, 22 elevators, and 47 escalators. The number of escalators in this terminal will exceed the 19 escalators in the remainder of the LIRR system combined. The escalators will measure long.

The LIRR terminal has entrances from Grand Central Terminal's Dining Concourse and Biltmore Room. Additionally, the MTA plans to build and open new entrances to the LIRR station at 45th, 46th, and 48th streets. , the 45th Street entrance alone was projected to serve 10,000 passengers per day.

Mezzanine

A mezzanine sits on a center level between the LIRR's two track levels. Reaching the street from the lowest new level, more than deep, will take about 10 minutes.

Platforms and tracks

LIRR trains will arrive and depart from the twin station caverns and through a tunnel that will sit below Park Avenue and more than below the Metro-North tracks.

The LIRR terminal added four platforms and eight tracks (numbered 201–204 and 301–304) in two bi-level caverns. There are four tracks and two platforms in each of the two caverns, with each cavern containing one platform with two tracks per level.

Art

Like Grand Central Terminal itself, the new station includes permanent artworks commissioned specifically for the transit center.

Among them are five large glass mosaics on natural themes by Kiki Smith. The Madison Concourse level contains "River Light", a abstract, largely blue-and-white depiction of sunshine on the East River. The other four, one level down in the LIRR mezzanine, are: “The Presence,” a landscape with a deer; “The Sound”, a seascape with a gull; “The Spring,” featuring four turkeys; and “The Water’s Way,” a beach scene. “I wanted places for people to say, ‘Meet you by the deer,’” Smith told the ''New York Times''.

The Madison Concourse level also holds an even larger mosaic by Yayoi Kusama: “A Message of Love, Directly from My Heart unto the Universe”.

References

External links

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Grand Central Terminal
Proposed Long Island Rail Road stations
Railway stations scheduled to open in 2022
Long Island Rail Road stations in New York City
42nd Street (Manhattan)
Park Avenue
Railroad terminals in New York City
Railway stations in Manhattan
Railway stations located underground in New York (state)