Sunnyside Yard

Sunnyside Yard is a large coach yard in the Sunnyside neighborhood of Queens, New York City. Owned by Amtrak and also used by New Jersey Transit and the Long Island Rail Road (LIRR), the yard was built by the Pennsylvania Railroad (PRR) and completed in 1910 with an as-built footprint of 192 acres (0.78 km) and 25.7 miles (41.4 km) of track. The yard served as the principal storage and servicing facility for PRR trains using Pennsylvania Station in Manhattan, to which it is connected by the East River Tunnels.

The yard incorporates Harold Interlocking, described as of 2012 as one of the busiest rail junctions in the United States, where Amtrak's Northeast Corridor crosses the LIRR Main Line and the Hell Gate Line. A balloon track at the yard's eastern end is used to turn Amtrak and NJ Transit trains terminating at Penn Station. Following the Penn Central merger of 1968 and that company's bankruptcy, the yard passed to Conrail and then to Amtrak in 1976; Amtrak continues to own and operate the facility.

Since the opening of Grand Central Madison in January 2023, some LIRR trains pass through tunnels beneath the yard as part of the East Side Access project. The MTA's Penn Station Access project, which will bring Metro-North Railroad service into Penn Station via the Hell Gate Line with four new stations in the eastern Bronx, is expected to further increase rail traffic through Harold Interlocking; full completion was rescheduled in 2025 to 2030.

Decades of railroad operations left soil, sewer, and groundwater contamination at the yard, which was listed in the 1980s as a Class 2 site in the New York State Registry of Inactive Hazardous Waste Disposal Sites and has been remediated under NYSDEC oversight across six operable units. Amtrak and the LIRR are also among the potentially responsible parties named for the adjacent Newtown CreekSuperfund site.

Beginning in 2017, the New York City Economic Development Corporation (NYCEDC) studied constructing a deck over the rail yard to support affordable housing. A 2020 master plan envisioned 12,000 affordable housing units alongside 60 acres (24 ha) of parks and public space, but the proposal lay dormant during the COVID-19 pandemic. In February 2026, Mayor Zohran Mamdani revived the proposal, asking the federal government for $21 billion to build the deck and 12,000 affordable homes after meeting with President Donald Trump in Washington, D.C.; reactions among Queens elected officials and community groups have been mixed.