It’s Dec. 31, 2020 in New York City, and because of the pandemic, Times Square is quiet. But eight blocks to the south, engineers and contractors work intensely to finish a transit station that has been years—no, decades—in the making: the Moynihan Train Hall.

At about 6 p.m., less than 12 hours before the station’s scheduled opening, NYC Buildings issued the certificate of occupancy (CO), and the crew popped the champagne corks.

“It was an exhilarating feeling, especially after the stress of rushing to do everything that was required on the last day to obtain the CO and all the trauma of 2020 due to COVID,” said WSP USA’s Shaun Pratt, who managed the $1.6 billion project for WSP’s client, Empire State Development. “There had been times over the previous seven to eight months when it didn’t seem possible that we’d actually meet the January 1st opening.”

The building is the Moynihan Train Hall, a 255,000-square-foot expansion of Penn Station – the busiest transit facility in the Western Hemisphere, used by more than 700,000 passengers every day. Located in the 108-year-old, one-million-square-foot Farley Building in downtown Manhattan, the new facility combines historic charm with modern convenience and technology to improve passenger experience in the Big Apple.

Not only did Pratt and his colleagues manage the project to on-time completion, but they also saved the client, Empire State Development (ESD), an estimated $100 million in costs from change orders, and they re-worked lighting and seating systems to improve aesthetics, efficiency, function and comfort.

For these and other accomplishments, Moynihan Train Hall was chosen as WSP’s Project of the Year in the over-$15 million category.

Moynihan Train Hall was first proposed in the 1990s by the late U.S. Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan to revive the grandeur of New York’s original Penn Station – a location Moynihan once said he shined shoes as a boy during the Great Depression – and improve transit efficiency.

Unfortunately, for the next two decades the project progressed slowly, until design-build contractor Skanska broke ground on the Skidmore Owings Merrill-designed train hall in August 2017, with WSP serving as program manager. As originally envisioned by Moynihan, the project expanded Penn Station into the James A. Farley building, New York’s former main post office.

WSP’s leadership team included Kelly Pilarski, deputy program manager; Garry Nunes, principal in charge; Martin Tagliaferro, construction and quality manager; Caroline Forbes, senior engineer; and Jenny Kapelyan, project controls manager.

The WSP team consisted of WSP staff and 27 sub-consultants that managed the design build contractor. Empire State Development was the project client and the WSP team worked in collaboration with the ESD team that was led by Doug Carr, executive director, who was ultimately responsible for ensuring that technical and operational requirements of the facility’s two primary tenants—Long Island Railroad (LIRR) and Amtrak—were met.

As is common on a large public project with multiple stakeholders, costs increased after groundbreaking. But, through scrutiny and careful negotiations with Skanska, WSP was able to contain cost increases and save ESD about $100 million. Pratt praised WSP’s sub-consultant Josh Horowitz of Hill International for helping achieve these savings. “His expertise in real estate development and construction helped us negotiate with the contractor to reduce and eliminate costs,” Pratt said.

But saving money didn’t mean lesser quality, and in keeping with its goal of producing a world-class building, ESD asked WSP in late 2019 to improve the seating area design.

“ESD wanted seating that was more comfortable and classical than standard Amtrak waiting-area seats,” Pratt said. So WSP hired the Rockwell Group as the architectural firm to re-design the seating. “The sculpted wood design and the comfortable blue cushioning of the seats really does harken back to rail’s grand history.”

Exterior lighting also emerged as a challenge in the third quarter of 2019. To solve problems in the proposed design, Pratt and his team brought in WSP colleagues with expertise in lighting design. “They came up with a conceptual design that was less expensive and more compatible with the historic exterior,” he said.

It was just as the design-build team was refining the new lighting concept into construction documents when the worldwide pandemic was declared, threatening to delay the project’s completion timeline.

“Like everything in New York, the project essentially stopped for a time,” Pratt said. With COVID precautions, construction was resumed, but materials shortages arising from the pandemic resulted in hair-raising delays that set up the tense race of New Year’s Eve.

Before that final push, WSP, Amtrak and LIRR deployed an operational readiness and activation transition program commonly used before opening new or renovated airports.

“The goal was to give rail operations staff practice in operating the new facility and equipment and to work out any bugs before opening,” Pratt said.

On two separate days before opening, several hundred people—mostly friends and family members of Amtrak and LIRR employees—took on the role of passengers using the facility. They put the building through a trial run, reading schedules, buying tickets and finding their way to train platforms. Engineers from WSP, Amtrak and LIRR looked for any glitches that might impact the passenger experience.

“As expected, some operational problems were identified,” Pratt said. “But all were fixed before the opening.”

The facility opened on schedule at 5 a.m. on Friday, Jan. 1, 2021. According to Pratt, being present on that first morning brought a priceless feeling of accomplishment and admiration for his colleagues and everyone who’d worked on such an iconic building.

“It is very satisfying to see the level of workmanship and the high quality of materials,” he said. “But of course, the biggest highlight was getting finished and opened by our deadline after enduring all the challenges of the pandemic.”

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