Amtrak Sunnyside Yard Maintenance Facility — Long Island City, New York

Amtrak is building a $1 billion maintenance and inspection facility at Sunnyside Yard in Long Island City, Queens. Work began in late August 2026 and runs in phases through 2030. It is the largest Amtrak maintenance facility to enter significant construction in the past two years, and the fifth to do so since 2024.

Project Scope

The core structure is a new two-track maintenance and inspection facility. Supporting work includes six new service and cleaning tracks, state-of-good-repair rehabilitation across 11 existing service platforms, and a modular office compound. The package also reconfigures two major interlockings and the track leading into them.

That interlocking work drives the phasing. The yard stays in service throughout, handling Northeast Corridor equipment while crews cut over switches around live movements, which is why a facility of this size is scheduled over four years rather than two. Signal cutovers on an operating railroad happen in short possessions, usually overnight and on weekends, and each one has to leave the yard fully functional by the start of service.

A joint venture of Scalamandre Construction and Citnalta Construction holds the general contractor role. Both are Long Island civil contractors rather than national megaproject builders, which says something about how Amtrak packaged the work: heavy on trackwork, signals and yard civil, light on the marquee architecture that draws the large nationals. Funding comes primarily from Congress through Federal Railroad Administration grants.

Why It Matters

The facility is purpose-built to service Airo, the trainset Amtrak is introducing to replace passenger cars roughly 50 years old. Fleet replacement depends on shop capacity, and new equipment without properly equipped inspection facilities ends up parked rather than earning revenue. Shops rarely get ribbon cuttings, but they decide whether a fleet transition holds its schedule.

Sunnyside also sits next to the East River Tunnel Rehabilitation Project. The two compete for the same operating windows into Penn Station, making coordination between the yard work and the tunnel outages a live constraint on both programmes. Amtrak is spending here while other transit agencies trim scope to protect budgets, and by 2030 the test is simple: whether Airo sets enter service on time, or wait on a shop.

Project Team & Details