Metro-North Railroad Grand Central Terminal Training Facility

GFT provided the Metro-North Railroad (MNR), an agency of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, (MTA) with a flexible, state-of-the-art, 10,000-square-foot training facility to house MNR’s training operations at the Grand Central Terminal in Manhattan. The existing facility was approaching three decades in age and could no longer accommodate MNR’s present and future training demands. The railroad serves more than 80 million customers a year in seven counties, operating more than 700 trains per day. MNR’s training program required updating and state-of-the-art learning technologies were needed.

The project entails a gut renovation of the seventh floor of the historic Grand Central Terminal. As such, the project had to be sensitively designed to preserve and modernize one of New York City’s great public buildings. Our team of expert engineers and architects designed a training environment that accommodates a variety of class sizes, handles a greater number of training sessions, and is adaptive to accommodate on-demand operational needs (town-hall meetings, seminar sessions, simulator training, and the like) using movable acoustically treated partitions.

The new environment instills a new brand that graphically expresses the railroad’s past yet incorporates modern technologies that advance MNR’s desire for a state-of-the-art training facility. Significant project features include fully automated audio-visual systems and displays, exposed structures, sky-fold partitions, and seamless transitions of spaces through volume manipulation.

In addition to the renovation of the training facility, we provided the terminal’s seventh floor with additional vertical transportation access, as the current elevator configuration permits access by means of one elevator. The new configuration will extend the two adjacent elevators to the seventh floor, which will triple the available passenger capacity.