SCHENECTADY
It was built in the late ’70s. The squat, one-story beige concrete building replaced the old Union Station, a grandlooking train station that had been torn down years earlier.
Its flat metal roof has faded with time. Its walls are spattered with graffiti. Its fl oors and walls are marked with the stains of many travelers, weather and age.
This winter, the eyesore is finally coming down.
“That’ll be a great day,” said Schenectady County Metroplex Development Authority Chair Ray Gillen. “Everyone in Schenectady just rues the day that they ever knocked down the old train station and put this up in its place, so we’re happy that we’re fi nally getting a new station.”
The new station will be a nod to the old, beloved Union Station, built in 1908 in the Beaux Arts style and torn down in 1971 to make way for a parking lot. The two-story station will feature fl oor-toceiling arched windows and a large clock, just like the old one. But first, Schenectady will have to put up with a modularstyle temporary station on the other side of Liberty Street for at least a year before it can get its old (new) station back.
On Wednesday, the Metroplex board approved a number of small resolutions to help pave the way for construc- tion to finally begin on a project that’s been in the works for years. The project will go out to bid this fall, and work can begin over the winter on a temporary station. Once that’s ready, the current station will be demolished to make way for the new one, which could take until 2017 to complete, Gillen said.
“It will probably go a little bit into 2017, but we don’t have a defined schedule yet,” he said.
The $14 million project will be paid for with state and federal funds, and will be built concurrent with a new platform to allow a second track to be installed between Albany and Schenectady to eliminate a major Amtrak bottleneck. Work on this new platform began last fall. The state Department of Transportation is the lead on the project, but is working together with Amtrak, Metroplex and the Capital District Transportation Authority.
Since the new station is slightly larger than the current one, Metroplex has agreed to sell 2,400 square feet of the parking lot it owns in front of and next to the station to Amtrak for $1. It also has agreed to give up part of the parking lot for the construction of a walkway from the new station to the CDTA terminal on State Street that spans the length of the Wall Street building housing Katie O’Byrnes and other businesses.
Metroplex also entered into a betterment agreement with the state, which has agreed to rebuild the parking lot surrounding the station for $300,000 as part of the project. The area in front of the Wall Street building next to Erie Boulevard isn’t covered by the agreement though, so Metroplex has agreed to spend $48,000 to refurbish this section of the lot itself.
“New York state DOT and the governor’s offi ce have been terrific in moving forward the new Schenectady station project,” Gillen said.
Schenectady’s train station is the only Capital Region station in the heart of a downtown. Metroplex officials said they’d eventually like to see a car rental service there, and confirmed plans are in the works with CDTA to launch a shuttle service from the train and nearby bus station to the Mohawk Harbor and casino site.
“People are going to come into the city by train and want to go to the harbor,” said Neil Golub, a member of the Metroplex board and local philanthropist. “The question then becomes, how do they get to the harbor?”
MARC SCHULTZ/GAZETTE PHOTOGRAPHER
The current Amtrak train station in Schenectady, which will be torn down this winter, is seen in a 2014 fi le photo.
This is a rendering of the new Schenectady train station — a nod to the old Union Station. The Schenectady County Metroplex Development Authority board approved a number of small resolutions to help pave the way for construction to finally begin on a project that’s been in the works for years.