Spotlight USA: NYC's Grand Central Madison Station Is Eerily Quiet, Won't Be For Very Long

Forgive me for my Debbie Downer complex because the City of New York and its Metropolitan Transport Authority finally finished the project last month. New York's Governor Kathy Hochul was among the patrons who rode that first Kawasaki M9 train into the new Grand Central Madison, resulting from this project. Now, this slightly chubby motoring journalist (me), on three hours of sleep, was ready to take his turn.

Six decades in the making

In one way or another, New York City has been trying to connect the Long Island Rail Road (LIRR) to its sister commuter network, the Metro North Rail Road (MTR) via Grand Central Terminal since the early 1960s. Calls to carve a second lower-level access path underneath the IRT Lexington Subway lines of the 63rd Street Tunnel went largely unanswered as the city entered two decades of economic turmoil between the early 1970s and early 1990s.

It wasn't until the 21st century that tunnel-boring technology capable of making the dream happen became operational. Even with boring machines with drill heads weighing hundreds of tons, it still took about 15 years, between September 2007 and January 2023, to complete the project at the cost of over $11 billion. So then, sounds like a place we needed to scope out for ourselves.

We started our journey, ironically enough, with an LIRR train on the Ronkonkoma line taking us to GCT's sister terminal, Penn Station. For decades, Penn Station served as Long Island's sole gateway by rail to Manhattan's West Side. Though often reviled as a drab, dreary consumerist hellscape by locals, recent renovations to Penn Station, like the Moynahan Train Hall, made for an interesting point of reference for the new Grand Central Madison station across town.

Taking advantage of an unseasonably warm mid-February New York afternoon, I forwent the obligatory Subway Shuttle line plus the 1-train trip between Penn Station and Grand Central Terminal in favor of walking. Large posters and small billboards touting the completion of the East Side Access project were prominent in and around GCT's immediate vicinity. Several hundred yards from the terminal, MTA employees from both the LIRR and MTR ate lunch and chatted in nearby Bryant Park.

The new crown jewel of NYC rail stations

It'd been a while since I'd walked through this part of Manhattan. As a result, my brain may have done a weird quirk where I follow signs that more or less point to my destination. Doing this led me not to GCT's main entrance on 42nd St but to one of its several auxiliary entrances between 47th St and Park Ave. When I walked through that entrance toward one of the most important public work projects in NYC's history, I wasn't sure what to expect.

I could only think to compare the experience to come with the years I'd spent riding the LIRR to Penn Station. As a young child, I remember thinking that Penn Station's retail selection was so vast and impressive that it condensed the entire city into a few hundred thousand square feet. I'm not sure why, but I had it in my head that any self-respecting New York City rail terminal would open with its retail space occupied up to the gills.

In fairness, Penn Station's Moynahan Train hall hilariously opened with all but a few food and retail outlets still needing to be opened. Deep down inside, I still hadn't gotten over that fact from my last Amtrak trip. But hey, at least the Magnolia Bakery was open. Their banana pudding was so good it made the lack of retail elsewhere more tolerable.

What's my point in saying this? Well, you'll probably understand my surprise as I walked closer and closer to Grand Central Madison station only to not find lines of commuters chomping at the bits to walk inside. In fact, the flow of people into the station itself from my vantage point was hardly even noticeable. It felt like a cruelly-devised psychological operation trying to walk down these uncannily quiet arterial hallways.

So quiet I could hear my own neurons firing

But even so, I still expected a flock of locals and tourists to be packed inside Grand Central Madison by the time I made it there. Consider me surprised when I finally made it to the station's main scheduling board only to be greeted by something unexpected, silence. Complete, unrelenting, and totally unexpected: silence. Only a handful of commuters roamed the halls alongside me as I made my way through the station.

"What gives?" I couldn't help but think to myself. The governor of New York State was here less than a month ago, touting how revolutionary the East Side Access project's completion would be for city commuters. This station should be every bit as packed to the brim with passengers as Penn Station routinely is. There's certainly enough commuter rail traffic through the city to make this the case.

But no. On a typical Friday afternoon when commuters should be flocking out of train cars to their jobs, the most chit-chat I saw came from MTA employees talking about being relieved the station is finally complete. That's besides the obligatory police and EMT personnel on site that no major American train station can operate without these days.

It just wound up making photographing Grand Central Madison's real party piece all that much easier. To reach the LIRR tracks in the station, one must descend via either elevator or escalator into the very bowels of New York City itself. These gargantuan four-abreast escalators turn your morning or evening commute from ordinary into almost like a roller coaster ride by how steep they are. The ample curated art accenting the walls of the station was a delight in itself too. A bit abstract, for sure, but that's modern art for you.

A soft opening for the frenzy to come

One can't help but think, being New York City, someone's going have a hideous accident on these stairs one day. But the non-stop PA announcement to behave yourself while riding the escalator should hopefully prevent that from happening. In truth, those escalators almost made the almost-dead new train station a more tolerable pill to swallow.

To top it all off, the proverbial sea of active retail space I was expecting was just a single impromptu stand selling admittedly cute-looking cakes and cookies with a coffee dispenser seemingly taken off an airliner at JFK. Worse still, the constructed retail space currently sits mostly unoccupied with vinyl overlays of what might one day occupy that space laid on the back side of the windows.

I pity the person who had to Photoshop all the name-brand labels off drinks and snacks covering one particular spot in the station we can assume will be filled by a convenience store. After more walking around, I think I found my answer to why the Grand Central Madison existed in this bizarre state.

No matter which of the dozens of listings for train departure times you look at, they all end at the same location. At least, for now, that is. All LIRR trains departing Grand Central Madison station will terminate only two stops away in the Jamaica neighborhood in Queens. While final preps for full-scale LIRR service to Grand Central Terminal wrap up, Jamaica station is as far as these trains go until February 27th of this year.

Both magnificent and underwhelming at the same time

That means that, for the moment, Grand Central Madison is only a little useful to most New Yorkers. But it most definitely will be far more useful in very little time at all. Also, expect much of this retail space to start filling up sooner than you can state your go-to coffee order. In due time, we can expect Grand Central Madison station to start filling up just like Penn Station during peak rush hours.

If it helps alleviate commuter traffic in the city even slightly, the public will proudly hail the project as a rousing success. In the meantime, having the last train of the night practically to ourselves was very strange indeed. Especially after our transfer train at Jamaica from Penn Station was packed like a sardine can.

One thing's for sure. We can't wait to come back when the station is in full swing. We'll bet Monopoly money that it won't be nearly as empty next time around.