New NYC train service linking Long Island to Grand Central omits promised LIRR stop in Sunnyside, Queens

Long Island Rail Road trains will soon pass though Sunnyside, Queens, on their way to new platforms in Grand Central Terminal — but the subway will remain the only train option to Manhattan for the neighborhood’s residents.

A promise to build a new LIRR station in Sunnyside to provide access to Penn Station was quietly abandoned by then-Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s administration in 2016 as the East Side Access project to send LIRR trains to Grand Central grew in both costs and construction delays, federal documents show.

“The station was a good concept, but it just never got the kind of support it needed,” said Assemblywoman Catherine Nolan, who’s represented Sunnyside in the state Legislature since 1985. “We just couldn’t quite kick it through the goal post.”

A new train station might have been something of compensation for Sunnyside residents who suffered from construction and truck noise during the years East Side Access was being built.

“For people in Sunnyside, there’s long been a problem with noise and noise mitigation from East Side Access,” said Lisa Deller, a vice chair of Queens Community Board 2. Deller was first briefed by MTA officials on the local impacts to East Side Access in 2001.

But Deller and other locals were long concerned about the proposed Sunnyside station’s location on the south side of Sunnyside Yard, on the neighborhood’s edge and a long walk from residential areas further south.

MTA planners as early as 1995 planned to build a station off Skillman Ave. over Sunnyside’s train yard, which is owned by Amtrak and used to store Amtrak and NJ Transit trains.

The station was not planned as a part of East Side Access service to Grand Central, but would have instead added a stop for trains heading to Penn Station, giving residents of western Queens a breezy path to Manhattan’s West Side. The MTA in 2002 estimated it would be used by 5,500 riders per day.

The Federal Transit Administration in 2001 approved the Sunnyside station as part of the overall East Side Access project, which at the time had an estimated cost of $4.3 billion.

Five years later, in 2006, the project’s cost ballooned to $6.3 billion, and the FTA agreed to kick in a $2.6 billion grant.

But the FTA did not set aside any of its grant for the Sunnyside station.

The station remained part of the project for the next 10 years, but MTA leaders said it was categorized under a separate umbrella of “regional investments” not included in the project’s primary budget.

In 2010, the MTA estimated the Sunnyside station would cost $53.4 million, and could have been built by 2013, records obtained by the Daily News show.

But in the following years, East Side Access’s overall price tag ballooned to over $11.6 billion and its completion date was pushed back to 2022. By 2016 — some 15 years after construction began — East Side Access was still only 66% complete.

Something had to give. In 2016, the MTA canceled the Sunnyside Station as a way to save time on the overall project.

The cancellation let the MTA move up by a year work on a vital component of the project — a redesign and rebuild of the Harold Interlocking, a complicated network of railroad switches in Sunnyside that is the busiest rail junction in the U.S.

LIRR and Amtrak trains both use the interlocking to get in and out of Manhattan.

Today, the Sunnyside station plan lives on as part of a draft of the MTA’s 20-year need assessment, which is to be published next year and will outline the agency’s biggest construction priorities.

The station at least could help the MTA provide its first one-seat train ride between the Bronx and Queens, agency planning documents show.

That would happen through the MTA’s Penn Access plan, which aims to send Metro-North trains from Penn Station through Sunnyside and then north to the Bronx over the Hells Gate Bridge in Astoria — the route long followed by New England-bound Amtrak trains.

Transit advocates hope for something bigger.

They’d like to see the Sunnyside station as part of a plan to ‘through-run’ Metro-North, LIRR and NJ Transit trains from New Jersey through Penn Station to eastern Long Island or up the Northeast Corridor toward New England.

“A Sunnyside Station that isn’t designed by all the region’s railroads, or with Penn Station through-running in mind, likely means the MTA will, yet again, design and build their own future obstacles,” said Liam Blank, a policy director at the Tri-State Transportation Campaign, which has pushed for through-running for years.

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In a statement, MTA spokesman John McCarthy hinted at the broader possibilities.

“Previous administrations have contemplated various concepts at Sunnyside Yards, but for the first time, we are actually assessing the utility and constructability of facilities in Sunnyside Yards and operational impacts on existing rail services,” he said.

A new station also could boost economic development in the area.

A March 2020 study ordered by former Mayor Bill de Blasio pitched the idea of a new neighborhood built on a deck over the Sunnyside Yards, similar to Hudson Yards in Manhattan and Atlantic Yards in Brooklyn.

The plan proposed 12,000 new units of housing, all centered around a new Sunnyside station. It’s unclear if officials under Mayor Adams support the idea.

The proposal is exactly the kind of thing local leaders are wary of, said Nolan, who would support construction of a new train station without any attached development.

“It seems the only way you get the station is to support gentrification,” she said. “I want to see it be a station, not some gigantic city.”