I’m pleased–and mighty relieved–to report that Robert Klara’s FDR’s Funeral Train, which I finished last night, is very, very good.

I’m relieved because ol’ Engine Bob is a pal (and former Trainjotting columnist!), and it would be really awkward if his book wasn’t any good.   But that’s not the case at all. Klara digs through some formerly classified files and finds troves of intriguing stuff–a KGB  agent on board the train that brought FDR from the place of his death in Georgia up to Hyde Park in New York, a heartbroken Eleanor learning details of her husband’s mistress, the newly minted prez Harry Truman pondering his historical speech, and what exactly to do with the atomic bomb, while on board the train. Most shocking is the sheer clout on board FDR’s train: the entire Supreme Court, FDR’s Cabinet, Truman, other key advisors–all on the same train for multiple days. Such a security risk is absolutely unthinkable today. It’s also particulary interesting when the train wends its way into the New York area. On April 15, 1945, the funeral train hit Penn Station around 4:15 a.m., docking on Track 11. Thousands of people had turned up at that ungodly hour with hopes of seeing FDR’s casket, or at least his train, but the train never was visible to the public in midtown Manhattan, staying deep underground all the while.

We’re pleased to report that our old pal Robert Klara–a.k.a. Trainjotting columnist “Engine Bob”–has his new book out today. FDR’s Funeral Train: A Betrayed Widow, a Soviet Spy, and a Presidency in the Balance looks at the train carrying the body of Franklin Delano Roosevelt to its final resting place upstate at Hyde Park. The train passed through the tri-state area while most of us slept. While FDR was dead, other passengers–including President Truman, the Supreme Court justices, perhaps a KGB spy–were very much alive. Klara digs into the classified files to find out what went on on that historic train.  

FDR’s Funeral Train is published by Palgrave MacMillan and is out today. I hear Barnes and Noble is placing the book prominently near its front doors today in New York; you can also grab a copy on Amazon for $18.

Klara is a pal, so I’m biased. But he’s one of the most engaging writers you’ll ever read. Our Q&A with him is below.

Trainjotting: Dozens of books have been done about FDR. What does yours offer that the others don’t?

Robert Klara:  Most of the FDR books out there are biographies—and where these works end, mine begins. My predecessors apparently took the view that, once FDR was gone, his story naturally concludes. But I disagree. In fact, what unfolded immediately after FDR’s death were three of the most frightening, moving, precarious, and politically complicated days in the history of this country—and also very much a part of FDR’s personal story, too.

It took three days to bring Roosevelt’s body from Warm Springs, Georgia (where FDR had been vacationing at his mountaintop cabin) to Hyde Park, New York, where he was buried on the grounds of his boyhood home. This 1,050-mile journey was a literal measure of the man: Not only did tens of thousands of Americans wait by the side of the train tracks to pay their respects to Roosevelt (whose body lay in a flag-draped casket visible through the windows of the funeral train’s rear Pullman), his interment train carried pretty much the entire U.S. government aboard.

Imagine something like this happening today (it never would): One dead president and one live one, both of their families, the Cabinet and the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the diplomatic corps, leaders of both houses of Congress and the nine Justices of the Supreme Court—all of them boarding a single conveyance to take a trip together and doing it amid a global armed conflict. It was an altogether foolhardy idea—but it was also the greatest showing of respect for a president that this country has ever managed.

Can you imagine what sort of intrigue would take place aboard that train? Can you imagine the job that the Secret Service and the U.S. military would have protecting that train? Well, you don’t have to imagine any of it, because it all actually happened in April of 1945. That’s what my book is about.

TJ: You’ve got a train in the title of your book. What role does the train play?

RK:  The train is the literal setting for most of the book, but there are really two trains involved. There’s the funeral train that the American public saw from the outside as its citizenry held trackside vigils in nine states. But there’s also the inside of the train—and this was the angle that most interested me. Because most everything about the train was classified as top-secret, the journalists aboard wrote very little about what took place behind all the drawn shades. And indeed, few books get into much detail about the doings aboard. My book is the first, so far as I know, to tell the full story—which includes tales of betrayal, espionage, rumors of an imposter’s body, and the atomic bomb.

TJ: Reportedly there’s a hidden platform under Grand Central that was used by FDR. Does that appear in the book?

RK: No, it doesn’t—but I’ve got a good reason: A living FDR used that platform, but his funeral train did not.

You’re speaking of Track 61, a small platform beneath the hotel serviced directly by a freight elevator, but abandoned since WWII. Current scholarship makes clear that the platform was not used anywhere near as much as the lore surrounding it suggests. The first famous person to avail himself of the secret entrance was General John J. Pershing, who visited the hotel in 1938.

FDR used the platform only once. It was during a campaign trip to New York City on October 21, 1944. He was driven by motorcade to the Waldorf that evening and delivered a speech to the Foreign Policy Association. Afterwards, his entourage took the freight elevator down to Track 61, where FDR boarded the Ferdinand Magellan—his private, armored Pullman car—and left for Hyde Park.

The Magellan figures large in my book, for it was part of the funeral train’s consist, accommodating Eleanor Roosevelt. But the Waldorf platform is part of the living FDR’s story. I hope another writer will do this part of it justice one day.

TJ: What was the most compelling thing to come out of your reporting? Wasn’t some of the material confidential, which is typical of presidential stuff?

RK:  Well, nearly everything concerning FDR’s movements during the war was classified, but most of these documents entered the public domain in the years afterwards. That doesn’t mean they were all easy to find, though. Many were at the Roosevelt Presidential Library in Hyde Park, but I had to file Freedom of Information Law requests with the Department of Homeland Security and Secret Service to get some of the papers. And, incredibly, the letters I was sent indicated that some of the documentation is still classified to this day.

The most compelling part of the story, to me, is the possibility of Harry Truman discussing the atomic bomb while aboard the funeral train—and I spend a good portion of the book making a case for that. But my favorite part, personally, concerned all the rumors that the body lying in FDR’s coffin was not FDR’s. At the time of the funeral train’s run, thousands of Americans were convinced that Roosevelt was not dead and that an imposter’s body and been substituted in his casket. The rumors were, of course, utter delusion—but it was a great deal of fun investigating them in order to disprove them.

TJ: What would FDR think of having a big NYC highway named after him? And why is there always traffic on the southbound side at 116th Street?

RK: Hey, these are supposed to be train questions! Well, my guess is that FDR would have happily lent his name to any road—so long as good, union labor was used to construct it. But I should mention that Roosevelt was very much alive when much of the highway in question was finished (FDR cut the ribbon at the Triborough’s opening in 1936.) But what’s today the FDR Drive was called the East River Drive back then. Like so many other infrastructural projects in NYC at the time, the thoroughfare was built by Robert Moses—one of the few men whom FDR truly disliked, and the feeling was mutual. But when FDR died (and his death spurred a naming frenzy around the country) even Moses couldn’t stand in the way of the movement to name the highway after Roosevelt.

Had he somehow been honored with that kind of commemoration when he was alive, however, FDR probably would have chaired the opening like the master statesman he was—being gracious, humble, and then cracking a joke. (In my head, it goes like this: “I finished building a dam in Nevada but they named it after Hoover—so I am pleased to accept the honor of placing my name on this fine road in New York.” I can almost hear it.)

As far as the traffic question goes, you’re talking to a man who hasn’t driven a car in a decade, but my guess is that there’s southbound backup at 116th Street because Exit 16 is a southbound exit only—and remember, it’s the first exit after the Triborough Bridge interchange and the messy junction with I-278. So my guess is that everybody cooking southbound off the Triborough and anxious to turn off into Manhattan picks this exit, so you get a clot of traffic.

My advice: Take the train.

Three years ago today, Trainjotting was born.

Yes, three years ago, we threw up a question and answer with Engine Bob, and Trainjotting had eked its way into the blogosphere.

Thanks to Mayor Bloomberg and MTA chief Jay Walder and of course President Obama for the birthday cards and well-wishes.

Thanks also to “Justin” for the nice note today:

TJ -

Love your site and read on a regular basis. These words of the week are always amusing and it would be great if you had some sort of “Dictionary” that was easily accessible and contained past and future entries.

Just an idea….

Big thanks to all the correspondents and contributors (JerseyJim, Straphanger Joe, Engine Bob, etc.) who’ve blessed the site with their wit and wisdom, but the biggest thanks go to the readers–those who chose to come to our site, and didn’t stumble upon Trainjotting by Googling ’train sex’ or ‘black drag queens’ or ‘where does don draper live.’

It gives me tremendous pleasure to announce the springtime publication of a book about a most unique train ride that chugged through our area nearly 65 years ago. In April 1945, a train hauling the giant bronze casket of Franklin Delano Roosevelt–not to mention some A-plus list political figures, including all nine Supreme Court justices, the entire Cabinet, ample Secret Service and perhaps even a KGB spy–made its way from Georgia up to Hyde Park, New York.

FDR’s Funeral Train: A Betrayed Widow, a Soviet Spy, and a Presidency in the Balance follows the high-wattage entourage as it wends its way along its 1,000 mile journey to Roosevelt’s final resting place. MacMillan publishes it in April and you can pre-order it on Amazon.

What makes me super-psyched is not just that the historic train ride at times went over Metro-North, New Jersey Transit and LIRR rails–unbeknownst to a sleeping Tri-State area, no less–but that it’s authored by Robert Klara–known to early Trainjotting readers as Engine Bob.

Klara penned the popular “Ask Engine Bob” column–exquisitely detailed and humorous answers to readers’ questions about railroad travel, Grand Central infrastructure and history, and train policy, in 2007. In fact, one column, about the mysteriously hidden Track 61 in Grand Central, actually touches on FDR riding the hidden rails into Grand Central and, we’d like to think, was the impetus for Klara’s book. We got some mad traffic on that one after Matt Lauer poked around on Track 61 on a special investigative Today show.

Engine Bob wrote: Arriving in the private Presidential railroad car-often arriving from his boyhood home in Hyde Park, just up the Hudson Line-FDR and his entourage would pull up to Track 61, alight, and take the elevator straight up to the hotel’s Presidential Suite. It must have been something to see.

Rob is also a good friend and, with TJ’s Rolodex lousy with wordsmiths, one of the top 2 or 3 writers I know. Rob is the kind of guy whose idea of a perfect Saturday is leafing through stacks of yellowing periodicals in the bowels of the New York Public Library to unearth heretofore little or unknown tidbits about New York history.

Like the tenacious reporter he is, Klara got a bunch of previously classified Secret Service documents declassified, and had some crazy fun with it. I can’t wait to see what Engine Bob comes up with.

By way of a synopsis:

Most commuters on Metro North, New Jersey Transit, and the LIRR are vaguely aware that the tracks they’re riding on have a history that predates the MTA. But check this out: Back during WWII, these lines were also part the most top-secret railroad journey of the 20th Century. 

FDR’s Funeral Train, a new book scheduled for release by Palgrave Macmillan in April of 2010, tells the incredible story of the special train that took the body of Franklin D. Roosevelt from Warm Springs, Georgia (where he died suddenly on April 12, 1945) to Hyde Park, New York, his boyhood home where he wished to be buried. Of course, everyone in America knew that FDR had died, so what was so secret? Not only did the train carry Roosevelt’s remains in a 700-pound bronze casket, it also carried the entire federal government—key members of the House and Senate, the entire Cabinet, President Harry S. Truman, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, plus all nine justices of the Supreme Court.

FDR’s funeral train will be released to coincide with the 65th anniversary of FDR’s death. You can find the book at all major booksellers and at Amazon.com. (ISBN-13: 978-0-230-61914-2)

As BobbyDerailed notes, tonight is the grand premiere of Extreme Trains on History Channel. According to the History Website, the show “reveals the incredible inner workings and past lives of the amazing locomotives that haul huge loads across the nation and deliver passengers to their destinations. The series shows the huge part these trains have played in shaping American history–and how vital trains are to American life today.”

The premiere, on at 10, shows a coal train chugging from mine to power plant across Pennsylvania.  

If Engine Bob had a TV, I know he’d be watching.

Finally got around to checking out the Grand Central documentary on PBS from the other night. It’s terrific, offering a painstakingly detailed look at the railroad’s transformation from steam to electric, Grand Central’s rivalry with that Joisey-accented west side upstart, Penn Station, and the sad tale of William Wilgus, the civil engineer who designed the transit system we know and love today.

There’s no shortage of tragedy in the tale, including the horrific crash of 1902, as the White Plains express blew through red lights and horns and hammered an idling train from New Rochelle in the Grand Central tunnel, killing 15. Photos of the old New Rochelle train station, looking something like a country farmhouse, are pretty cool.

Not long after the system was switched to electric–1907 or so–a train headed for White Plains jumped the track at Woodlawn, killing 20.

The doc also explains Wilgus’s concept of “taking wealth from the air” and selling the air rights above Grand Central to finance the project, the first documented case of selling air rights.

Sadly, Wilgus gets thrown under the bus by railroad brass after the Woodlawn incident. He was deemed “culpably negligent” because the crippling weight of the train’s engines caused the rails to widen; later designs better distributed the weight.

A variety of talking heads, from architects to historians to the esteemed writer Susan Eddy, who happens to be the Missus’s old boss, offer intriguing perspective. But I couldn’t help but wonder–how did they not have our own Engine Bob sharing Grand Central stuff that no one else knows?

Q: Engine Bob, why don’t have they have a no cell-phone “quiet car” on Metro North, like they do on Amtrak? Surely, enough quiet-seeking commuters could fill a train car? 

A: What a fine, fine question. My fingers are twitching already. In fact, hang on a sec while I take another blood-pressure pill, because your question has just reminded me of the afternoon, last year, that I took a New Haven train home to Manhattan from South Norwalk and had to listen to a… um… Okay, she was one badass gangsta ho.

And, sitting in the seat across the aisle from mine, she proceeded to whip our her cell phone and call each and every one of her “Bridgeport girls” (about eight in all) and regale each of them with tales (spoken at full volume) of her latest man’s considerable endowment—and I’m not talking about his investments.

Stuck on a packed train and unwilling to give up my seat for fear of not finding another, I listened to the gum-popping young lady for nearly two hours, all the time listening to my own voice, buried deep within me, and whimpering: “Why, oh why, can’t Metro North have just one car on which cell phones are banned?” 

Why, indeed. After all, you say, doesn’t Amtrak have such no-cell-phone cars? Damn right, sir, yes they do. Just one disclaimer before I continue, okay? I am about to reiterate the railroad’s position on this issue—NOT defend it or even, frankly, attempt to explain it. Because it would take Nero Wolfe to decipher the wisdom of this one. 

Metro North’s position on the matter boils down to two arguments. First, everybody needs a seat. When trains are packed—as, during rush hours, we all know they are—the railroad can’t adopt restricted-use cars because these might preclude some passengers from having a seat. (Interestingly, the no-cell-phone cars on Amtrak’s Northeast Corridor trains operate along the same principle: Only on “non-capacity” trains where there are far more seats than passengers does the conductor have clearance to designate one of his coaches as a cell-phone-free zone.) Anyway, for Metro North, the policy is: All seats, all over the train, are for everyone. 

Yes, I know: Anyone CAN sit in a no-cell-phone car—he’s just not allowed to use his stinking cell phone when he does! Seems like a cogent enough argument. And it’s one that escorts me nicely to Metro North’s Argument No. 2. Are you ready? 

The First Amendment. 

Yes, this is what I was told when I pressed an MTA official on the cell-phone matter not too long ago. The railroad will not put itself in a position in which it risks being accused of restricting someone’s speech. But, you retort, the railroad would NOT be restricting speech—just the use of a device into which a passenger elects to speak. He could still say whatever he wishes to the open air, right? Removing a cell phone no more abridges the right of free speech than, say, removing a microphone from someone’s hand would—right? 

Right. But there comes a time when you know that even the best arguments are going to get you nowhere. And, with the Metro North official I’d managed to collar, I knew I had very quickly reached such a point. Argue all you want, Perry Mason, the policy’s not changing.

To be fair, the official was sympathetic: Yes, some people’s cell phone habits are deplorable, he said, and we’ve all “been there,” as he put it—meaning, presumably, stuck beside a Minnie Pearl who cackles into her phone all the way to Purdy’s. He also reminded me that Metro North conductors have of late been instructed to make a general announcement on crowded trains, asking people to please limit their cell-phone use “in consideration of your fellow passengers.” Such pleas, as we know, rank in effectiveness right up there with Manhattan’s jaywalking law—or the one strictly prohibiting the sale of Louis Vuitton knockoffs on Canal Street.

Meantime, sir, don’t get your hopes up about a no-cell-phone car on your train. Metro North is more likely to roll out a squash-court car first.

I got this emphatic answer to my question about the mysterious tennis court in Grand Central. Apparently, this appeared on yelp.com.

Recently, I had a unique experience at Grand Central that I will never forget. My friend and I were riding the elevator up to the Campbell Apartment and he was telling me that it’s a little known fact that there are tennis courts inside the terminal. I LOVE fun facts like this, and imagining what other hidden treasures there are inside this amazing structure.

As he was telling me this, the man riding up in the elevator with us said, “Yes, it’s true”, at which point we realized that there was someone there (taking off our New York blinders that block out anyone within eye contact range). Then he said, to my open-mouthed joy, “Would you like to see it?”

Turns out, we were in the company of the manager of the Tennis Club of Grand Central. It’s a private club now owned by Donald Trump, and plays host to some of the top seeded players of the US Open. This is not a club for your average Joe - fees are up to $170 for an hour of court time. Amazing considering that Trump found it laying dormant in the 80’s - laying dormant!!

Oh it makes me want to explore and explore, late at night with a flashlight. Anyway, the the space has even more history, as prior to the 1960’s it was used as the original set for CBS News, and was also where they filmed the first episode of the Honeymooners. To stand where Edward R. Murrow and Walter Cronkite used to broadcast live was quite a treat, indeed. 

It’s written by a San Fran lady named Liz S. If she and Engine Bob were to go out for coffee, I think we’d pay for it.

Q: Engine Bob, I commute to New Jersey from Penn Station, which means my train runs beneath the Hudson River. Somebody once told me that those tunnels are so shallow that they’re not anchored to anything and they “swing” like garden hoses as trains run through them. It does sort of feel like the train is bouncing as it runs thorough. Don’t tell me this story is true. 

A: Okay, I won’t—because it’s not. The bounce you’re feeling is, alas, only the bounce of the suspension assembly on the pair of wheel trucks of your train (Train cars have suspension just like automobiles do, because even though rails are obviously smoother than a paved road, your butt riding on a steel wheel that hits an inch-wide rail gap at 80 m.p.h. is going to feel it, so the wheel assemblies use springs or hydraulics to prevent you from getting wrinkles before your natural time.)  

But, like I said, the answer’s no: Those tunnels—there are two of them, each about 23 feet in diameter—do not bounce. There is some minor “play” to them, but bounce is a bit extreme. (That said, it’s true that plenty of transportation structures have sway coefficients factored in; the Manhattan Bridge, for example, flexes a few inches as the subways run across it. Prior to its recent renovation, it was actually moving several feet, but that was, uh, a problem.) 

Anyway, the true story of the purportedly bouncing tunnel is, however, almost as cool as the myth. Begun in 1903, those tunnels were the first real-world manifestations of an engineering patent granted to British engineer Charles Jacobs. His invention was called the “Tunnel Bridge,” actually.

Didn’t happen to notice a bridge when you were down there last? Well, here’s how it worked. Excavated for the Pennsylvania Railroad, the “North River Tunnels,” as they’d been known, were made of interlocking iron (and sometimes steel) rings that were bolted together behind a massive drilling shield, inside which workers hand-dug through the river silt that was kept from inundating them by a high-pressure atmosphere artificially created inside the tunnel by huge air compressors up on the ground. (When a worker failed to spend enough time in the pressure-equalizing airlock, he’d come down with “the bends,” which you might have heard of before.) 

The tunnels rest at varying depths below the bottom of the river but, much like your last blind date, are surprisingly shallow—usually buried only about 20 feet in the muck. The bedrock is much further down, but tunneling through rock would have been impossible not so much because of the difficulty of the drilling, but because the trains couldn’t (and still can’t) climb grades much steeper than 2%, and diving down to bedrock level from either Manhattan or New Jersey would have required a really steep descents and ascents, since the river’s only about a mile wide.

Yeah, even in the Olden Days, life was just as complicated. 

So that’s where the “bridge” part came in. Every 15 feet, workers fitted the iron rings of the advancing tunnel with a “bore segment.” This was a special ring through the bottom of which would pass a long, thick screw. The sandhogs would crank that screw straight down until it reached the bedrock, then they’d drill it in nice and tight (please, no second reference to your last blind date.) And that maneuver anchored the tunnels. 

So, imagine your commuting tunnel now: It runs through the river mud, but since the mud’s not thick enough to support the enormous weight of the tunnel and its trains, you’ve got what are essentially legs—pilings, really, like you see on a pier—that hold the tunnel up and keep it in place. Sorry, then—no bounce.

But what’s really amazing is that those tunnels have been down there for a century. Hundreds of trains a day run through. And still—all safe.  

I don’t know where Charles Jacobs is buried, but I’d leave him a nice bouquet if I knew. 

—E.B.

Q: If my Metro North train is on the underground level, why do I have to go to street level from the (underground) subway, only to descend again for my Metro North train? Shouldn’t I be able to stay underground when going from the subway to the Metro North?
 
A: Well, if you think about it, you do stay underground for some of the transfers. To get from the Shuttle platform into Grand Central, for example, one only ascends a single stretch of stairs to reach the western corridor into the upper concourse and the Metro North tracks—and you remain underground the entire time. 

But, yeah, okay, I’m being an annoying shit—you’re talking about the 4, 5, and 6 subways, aren’t you? You want to know why in hell does the MTA send you all the way up to the street level merely to prolong the Bataan Death March back down to your Metro North train?

Good question. But let me split just one more hair before I answer you. If you’re talking about transferring from the 4, 5, and 6 trains (a/k/a the Lexington Avenue Line) to Grand Central’s upper-level tracks, you are pretty much being sent no higher than you have to be. The upper-level commuter tracks lie at the bottom of a very gentle slope off the terminal’s main concourse—and the concourse level is exactly as high as you climb (from platform up to mezzanine, then from mezzanine via escalator to the eastern corridor of the terminal) as you leave the subway. 

But if you’re talking about getting off the subway and hoofing it for a Metro North train on the lower-level tracks, well, I feel your pain. Your aching knees, specifically. Why do you have to go up to go down? Isn’t a more direct connection possible? 

Short answer: No—There’s too much shit in the way. 

Long answer: No—now, proceed with below. 

Let’s just establish some parameters first—with the understanding that the figures I furnish are merely estimates. Here are some fun facts for your next commuter cocktail party:
* Grand Central upper level tracks:­ 1 story down (about 20 feet)
* Grand Central lower level tracks:­ 2 stories down (about 60 feet)
* Subway Shuttle: 2 stories down (about 50 feet)
* Subway 4, 5, and 6 Grand Central station:­ 2 stories down (about 50 feet)
* Subway No. 7 Flushing Line is one deep-ass train—about 80 feet below the street—and too far below Metro North’s tracks to make it useful to include here. 

Now, I’ve already dealt with the Shuttle so we’ll leave that out. Let’s look at the Lexington Avenue Subway—how deep it is, and also where it is. First, the terminal’s lower-level tracks and the Lexington Avenue Subway trains are almost exactly at the same depth: Score 1 for your argument that there really ought to be a straight-line connection without ascending to street level. 

Second, Grand Central platforms of the 4, 5, and 6 trains are actually built on a 45-degree diagonal relative to the avenues. (This is, incidentally, because the Park Avenue portion of the subway opened in 1904 but the Lexington Avenue extension north was not opened until 1918. The subway had to literally move over from Park Avenue to Lexington, and that connecting stretch was where the subway station was put in.) The 4, 5, and 6 stop for Grand Central roughly cuts diagonally beneath the southeastern corner of the Terminal proper—in easy reach of the commuter tracks toward the terminal’s eastern side: Score 2 for your argument. So, again, why the hell isn’t there one? 

As referenced above: There is too much shit in the way. If you were to try to dig a passage leading from the 4, 5, and 6 platforms right into, say, the general area of Tracks 101 – 103 on the terminal’s lower level, you’re talking about having to cut through the foundation walls of the old Commodore (now Grand Hyatt) Hotel, a task made more nightmarish by the tightly-spaced grid of support columns—needed to carry the weight of the building above—that run the length of the subway’s platforms. But okay, say that you somehow manage to snake some stairs around all those girders and I-beams. Next, you’d have to blast through the foundation wall of Grand Central Itself. Such a thing is possible, I suppose—but, finally, you’d run into the figurative boulder that cannot be moved. 

When the railroad’s chief engineer William J. Wilgus planned out the track arrangements for the new Grand Central Terminal in 1903, he had to find a way to turn trains around quickly within the tight confines of its interlock. Wilgus did this by designing loop tracks on both levels. The loop tunnels curve around below the terminal’s façade, connecting the westernmost and easternmost tracks in the shape of a large horseshoe [for more about the loops and how you can experience them with family and friends, refer to the Engine Bob installment that immediately precedes this one.] Those loops are not as quaint as they sound; they’re massive tunnels, two—and in places three—tracks wide, with massive load-bearing walls enclosing them on both sides. There is no conceivable way that the terminal could ever sacrifice the operational advantage of the loop tracks (much less run up an expense that would rival the gross national product of France) by ramming a pedestrian passageway through them. And because the loop is two-stories deep and swings to the laterally widest points of the terminal’s track grid, there’s simply no way around them. 

Other, that is, than being led above them, then back down on their other side—which is exactly what you are made to do right now.