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Discussion relating to the PRR, up to 1968. Visit the PRR Technical & Historical Society for more information.
 #405239  by JoeG
 
I just read an interesting book on the construction of NY's Penn Station and its tunnels. This book came out this year and contains lots of stuff I didn't know. It is not, however, written from a railfan perspective.
The book's title is Conquering Gotham. Its more informative subtitle is A Gilded Age Epic: The Construction of Penn Station and its Tunnels. The author is Jill Jonnes.
The book is written from a socio-political perspective but it has lot of engineering information. For example, the Hudson tunnels move up and down with the tides, and the engineers in charge of the project didn't know what to do about it. In the end they reinforced the concrete tunnel lining with steel, but they were not positive the tunnels would be safe; in that sense opening them to traffic was a gamble. The Hudson and Manhattan rapid transit tunnels were built at the same time as the Pennsy tunnels, but I didn't realize until now that both Hudson tunnel projects had the same chief engineer.
The book even addresses the fact that Penn Station's neighborhood never got the high-class commercial real estate development that Grand Central's did. Jonnes says that Penn Station was built in a bad neighborhood, part of the old Tenderloin, the vice district, and that it needed the railroad to take the lead in investing in commercial buildings around the station, as the NYC did at Grand Central. The Pennsy never did. It might be that the Pennsy was short on money. Although it was making money, its stock was hammered by the costs of the Penn Station project; most investors thought that such an expensive passenger station would never pay off (and it didn't.) The Pennsy was getting Wall St criticism for the loans it took out to build the project and its managers may have decided against borrowing more for commercial real estate development. What a bad decision!
The book has some flaws. It gets "novelistic" at times; the author tries too hard to make up atmospheric stuff that she really doesn't know. There are a few annoying errors of fact. And there is a lot left out. But the book should be read by any Pennsy fan.