BALTIMORE — Amtrak will spend $90 million to upgrade Baltimore’s Penn Station, a move expected to ignite $400 to $600 million in development around the station area, the Baltimore Sun reports.Amtrak will make station and track improvements and lease an adjacent lot to a group, Penn Station Partners, to build a mixed-use project.
“Amtrak seeks to transform central Baltimore into a premier regional transportation hub that will provide new amenities and transit connections,” Amtrak CEO Richard Anderson said in an announcement of the project.
Amtrak’s work will include the addition of a new station platform, as well as renovation of an existing platform to return it to service.
The Beaux-Arts station was completed in 1911 at a cost of $1 million. More than 1 million passengers used the building in fiscal 2018.
I was intimately involved in a previous Penn Station, Baltimore, plan that would have created an intermodal terminal as part of the renovation of the station along to a hotel and other amenities. I was on the neighborhood board and the board of the benefits district that included the station and even wrote an editorial (at the request of the association) in favor of the project for the Baltimore Sun citing numerous successful examples of intermodal in other US cities. Greyhound was being evicted from their terminal in downtown Baltimore and was enthusiastic about moving to the new terminal. Plan in place. Designs presented. At the last minute several big deal people and “business leaders,” killed the plan because they felt that Greyhound would have attracted “the wrong people,” as one person put it. Greyhound was forced into a new terminal South of the city that had no light rail or commuter rail connections (and virtually no bus service) even though it was possible to actually stand on the site and see them in the distance! It remains there to this day. And Baltimore remains behind the rest of the corridor. One of the business leaders who killed the plan later merged his company with another and moved their entire operation out of the neighborhood taking a lot of jobs with them. So much for leadership and community support. Let’s hope this plan gets done in a timely manner with real public support.
1 million passengers per year sounds like a big underestimation, for as many trains per day…
I wish they would add a Metropolitan Lounge for first class passengers.
Baltimore’s Penn Station is the same age as Houston Union Station. Houston’s population was 78,800 in the 1910 census. The former headhouse of HUS is now the façade to Minute Maid Park, home of the MLB team Houston Astros.
If Amtrak had not chosen to leave Union Station, but instead move The Sunset Limited there, it would still be an active railway station. The Astros might have located to the southeast or northeast in Houston’s diagonal downtown grid.
Good idea..priorities! Baltimore is in dire need of a new tunnel.
Sounds like a good use of assets
Let Baltimore pay for it.
Jeffrey, Inadvertently,you have pointed out the discrepancy that exist regarding Amtrak service from one region to another. It is a total disgrace that the nation’s 4th largest city with a population of well over two million does not even have daily Amtrak service.
Penelope Vinson – The Sunset has a total of 6 trains a week. Baltimore has dozens of trains a day, Amtrak and commuter trains. Not at all comparable use.