Sunnyside Yard is a large coach yard in the Sunnyside neighborhood of Queens, New York City. Owned by Amtrak and also used by New Jersey Transit and the Long Island Rail Road (LIRR), the yard was built by the Pennsylvania Railroad (PRR) and completed in 1910 with an as-built footprint of and of track. The yard served as the principal storage and servicing facility for PRR trains using Pennsylvania Station in Manhattan, to which it is connected by the East River Tunnels.
The yard incorporates Harold Interlocking, described as of 2012 as one of the busiest rail junctions in the United States, where Amtrak's Northeast Corridor crosses the LIRR Main Line and the Hell Gate Line. A balloon track at the yard's eastern end is used to turn Amtrak and NJ Transit trains terminating at Penn Station. Following the Penn Central merger of 1968 and that company's bankruptcy, the yard passed to Conrail and then to Amtrak in 1976; Amtrak continues to own and operate the facility.
Since the opening of Grand Central Madison in January 2023, some LIRR trains pass through tunnels beneath the yard as part of the East Side Access project. The MTA's Penn Station Access project, which will bring Metro-North Railroad service into Penn Station via the Hell Gate Line with four new stations in the eastern Bronx, is expected to further increase rail traffic through Harold Interlocking; full completion was rescheduled in 2025 to 2030.
Decades of railroad operations left soil, sewer, and groundwater contamination at the yard, which was listed in the 1980s as a Class 2 site in the New York State Registry of Inactive Hazardous Waste Disposal Sites and has been remediated under NYSDEC oversight across six operable units. Amtrak and the LIRR are also among the potentially responsible parties named for the adjacent Newtown Creek Superfund site.
Beginning in 2017, the New York City Economic Development Corporation (NYCEDC) studied constructing a deck over the rail yard to support affordable housing. A 2020 master plan envisioned 12,000 affordable housing units alongside of parks and public space, but the proposal lay dormant during the COVID-19 pandemic. In February 2026, Mayor Zohran Mamdani revived the proposal, asking the federal government for $21 billion to build the deck and 12,000 affordable homes after meeting with President Donald Trump in Washington, D.C.; reactions among Queens elected officials and community groups have been mixed.
Site and layout
Sunnyside Yard occupies a long, narrow site in western Queens, New York City, bounded on the south by Skillman Avenue, on the north by Northern Boulevard, and extending eastward toward Woodside, with the East River Tunnels portal area at its western end. As built in 1910, the yard had an overall length of , a maximum width of , and an initial footprint of with of track. At completion, the yard was divided into a North Yard and a South Yard. The North Yard initially contained 42 tracks with capacity for 526 passenger cars; the South Yard contained 45 tracks with a 552-car capacity, with provision to expand the South Yard by 32 additional tracks for a further 309 cars. Although the yard is "stub-end" in geographic terms (sitting at the end of the division), it functions as "double-end" in terms of train movements, served by two loop tracks running from the East River Tunnels around the yard to its eastern end. The New York City Economic Development Corporation (NYCEDC) has used a working figure of for the modern rail-yard footprint considered for air-rights development. Ownership of the yard is divided among Amtrak, the MTA, and General Motors. Amtrak owns about , the MTA about (with New York City holding the air rights over the MTA parcels), and General Motors owns a facility of roughly in the yard's southeastern section.
Because it occupies a long, narrow site, local commentators have described the yard as a physical barrier in western Queens. The local historian Mitch Waxman wrote that the yard "tends to insulate Long Island City from the rest of western Queens, forcing its residential and business traffic to pass through and around narrow or crowded choke points like Queens Plaza." Supporters of decking over the yard have framed the project as a way to reconnect neighborhoods it separates. The master plan's architects called the yard "a profound gap in our city's fabric," and an Astoria resident told Streetsblog that what he called "a wasteland that divides Sunnyside and Astoria" could instead "knit the communities together."
The shared tracks of the LIRR Main Line and Amtrak's Northeast Corridor adjoin the yard. The adjacent Sunnyside Gardens Historic District (south of the yard) was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1984 and the Hunters Point Historic District (west of the yard) was designated by the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission in 1968.
History
Site before 1903 The Sunnyside Yard footprint lies within the historic settlement area of Dutch Kills in western Queens. Burgon Brocard (or Bragaw), a French Huguenot exile from Mannheim in the Rhenish Palatinate who had emigrated to Manhattan in 1675, in 1690 acquired a farm of several hundred acres at Dutch Kills, on the site where Burger Jorissen had established a grist mill around 1648; the property descended through several generations of the Brocard/Bragaw family. Richard Bragaw built a gambrel-roofed house in the English style atop Sunnyside Hill in 1790, on the line of present-day 32nd Place halfway between Northern Boulevard and Skillman Avenue, within what would become the yard footprint. The area takes its name from "Sunnyside Hill," the Bragaw family estate at Dutch Kills established with that 1690 purchase and consolidated under Brocard's son Isaac in 1713; a "Sunnyside" roadhouse built along Jackson Avenue in the 1850s for visitors to the Fashion Course in nearby Corona has also been cited as the source of the neighborhood name. The surrounding area was annexed to Long Island City when that city was incorporated in 1870 and consolidated into the City of Greater New York in 1898.
Beginning in September 1902, agents of the Pennsylvania Railroad quietly purchased the houses and land between Skillman Avenue and Northern Boulevard from 21st Street east to 43rd Street near Woodside. The railroad's plan for a yard at the site became public on June 2, 1903, after its protest the previous day against a proposed Sunnyside street that would have cut through the planned yards within 200 feet of the East River Tunnel portal. Long Island Rail Road president William H. Baldwin Jr. confirmed the broad outlines of the scheme to The New York Times, which described the planned terminal yards as "to be the greatest in size in the world." The broader Pennsylvania Railroad landholding in the area eventually amounted to about , of which the yard's as-built footprint occupied a portion. Most of the colonial farmhouses on the site were demolished in 1903, including the Richard Bragaw house in July of that year. In 1907–1908, the railroad leveled an approximately hill ( high) at 34th–35th Streets and used the spoil to fill more than of tidal marshland at the headwaters of Dutch Kills, a tributary of Newtown Creek, to a depth of ; an estimated of earth had been moved for the leveling and fill operation by 1909.
Construction (1903–1910)
The Pennsylvania Railroad acquired the Sunnyside site as part of the New York Tunnel Extension, the broader initiative through which the PRR built Pennsylvania Station and the East River Tunnels to bring its Long Island and New England trains directly into Manhattan. The PRR's subsidiary, the Pennsylvania Tunnel and Terminal Railroad Company, was incorporated for the project. Part of the site already lay along an existing Long Island Rail Road right-of-way to the north shore, which was temporarily shifted southward during construction.
A Board of Engineers organized in January 1902 oversaw the New York Tunnel Extension; Alfred Noble served as chief engineer for the East River Division, with Louis H. Barker as resident engineer for Sunnyside Yard. The New York City Board of Estimate formally approved the yard plan on February 15, 1907, alongside the contract authorizing the New York Connecting Railroad; The New York Times described the project that May as "the largest electric car yard in the world." Excavation, contracted to the Degnon Realty and Terminal Improvement Company under resident engineer Waldo C. Briggs, began in December 1906 and was completed in late 1909; track laying was finished about a year later. Approximately of earth were moved using steam shovels and construction trains, with six street viaducts, two under-grade crossings, and seven concrete-and-steel railroad bridges constructed within the yard.
The yard was built from the start as an electric facility, served by a power station in Long Island City opposite 34th Street that had been in operation since 1905, when the Long Island Rail Road electrified its Atlantic Avenue branch. All electric generation, substation equipment, and locomotive and multiple-unit motive power for the New York Tunnel Extension was supplied by the Westinghouse Electric & Manufacturing Company. Every yard track was third-rail equipped to allow trains to be moved by electric locomotives without steam, and concrete trenches between alternate tracks carried air, water, steam, and battery-charging conduits to each car on each track. Throughout the yard and the connecting tunnel approaches, switches, automatic stops, and semaphore signals were operated by an electro-pneumatic system supplied by the Union Switch & Signal Company and controlled from eleven cabins housing 516 working levers, four of them within Sunnyside Yard. Service buildings, designed by the Pennsylvania Tunnel and Terminal Railroad Company's engineering staff under Noble and George Gibbs and constructed by the John W. Ferguson Company of Paterson, New Jersey, included an Inspection Building and Machine Shop (), a Boiler House and Sub-station (), a Stores and Commissary Building () for Pullman and dining-car supplies, a Battery Repair Building, an Oil and Lamp House, and additional storage and Pullman cleaning sheds. Track laying was completed about a year after the December 1909 finish of excavation, in time for the September 8, 1910 opening of the East River Tunnels for Long Island Rail Road service into Pennsylvania Station; through service via the Hudson River Tunnels followed at midnight on the night of November 26–27, 1910, when the first regular train departed at 12:02 A.M.
Factories surrounded the yard. On the south side, the Degnon Terminal industrial district included businesses served by rail siding, among them the American Chicle Company chewing gum factory, the Eveready Battery Company battery factory, and the Loose-Wiles Biscuit Company (Sunshine Biscuits) factory. Adjacent to the Degnon district, the Swingline stapler factory occupied a building at 32-01 Queens Boulevard from 1951 until production was relocated to Mexico in 1999. To the immediate south of the yard, the City Housing Corporation purchased a tract from the Pennsylvania Railroad in 1924 to develop the Sunnyside Gardens planned community (1924–1928), one of the earliest American garden suburbs. The City Housing Corporation, founded by Alexander M. Bing and modeled on England's Letchworth and Welwyn Garden City limited-dividend companies, opened the first 128-unit phase in November 1924 with Clarence Stein as chief architect; The New York Times reported the corporation had acquired 1,100 lots projected to house roughly 700 families.
Pennsylvania Railroad era (1910–1968)