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Duffy Discusses the Penn Station Transformation, Aug. 27, 2025

August 27, 2025 · US Department of Transportation · 0:34:22

Embedded from the source channel — never re-uploaded. Watch on YouTube

What happened

Transportation Secretary Sean P. Duffy hosted a press conference on the redevelopment of New York Penn Station, in the Department of Transportation’s upload of the event, alongside Andy Byford, special advisor to the Amtrak Board of Directors, as the department’s description names him. Duffy said the party had just ridden the brand-new Acela from Washington’s Union Station — whose revitalization the department had announced that morning, as he recounted it — and that the Penn Station project had been pulled back from the MTA: he had not been shy, he said, about his frustration with the MTA’s spending and deliverables, or his lack of faith that it could deliver this project.

He announced a $43 million grant to begin the solicitation for a master developer, as he stated the figure, and promised the project would move, as he put it, at the speed of Trump — not a 20- or 30-year project, and not one whose benefits only riders’ grandchildren would enjoy. Byford set out the process as he stated it: an open and fair competition with no preconceived outcome, run to an aggressive timeline aimed at a construction start — a spade in the ground — by the end of 2027, alongside short-run improvements to the existing station experience while the transformation proceeds.

Why it matters

Penn Station is the rail counterpart of Duffy’s deliverables doctrine: the country’s busiest rail station taken back from the transit authority he faulted, a federal grant to open a master-developer competition, and a dated construction-start target — end of 2027 — against which the project can be measured, announced on the same day as the NextGen Acela launch and the Union Station reclaim paged separately on this site.

Scoreboard watch

Scoreboard candidate: the $43 million Penn Station grant and the end-of-2027 construction-start target, announced August 27, 2025. Flagged for the scoreboard editor; no entry is published from this page.

Sources: U.S. Department of Transportation, “Secretary Duffy Discusses Penn Station Transformation” (official upload, embedded above). Remarks and figures as delivered by Secretary Duffy and Andy Byford at the press conference.