Eight Trains an Hour: It’s the Future Buffalo’s Central Terminal Deserves

Sections:
The gateway
Why did the Terminal close?
Synergies
Why Buffalo Central?
What will it take?
Start with the Empire Corridor
Get a poster

The Buffalo Gateway

Imagine Buffalo Central Terminal on a Friday evening in the not-so-distant future.

The Art Deco tower glows against the night sky. The platforms hum with travelers and with trains arriving in a steady rhythm. Every hour, trains arrive and depart in four directions: Cleveland, Toronto, and two routes to New York. The station is full of life.

Some say this is a pipe dream. But it’s the future that rail advocates should expect.

Buffalo is the heart of a region dense with great cities—Boston and New York to the east, Chicago and Detroit to the west, Toronto and Montreal to the north, Cleveland and Pittsburgh to the south. More than one in three US residents—nearly 120 million people—live within 500 miles of Buffalo.

Yet the building that made Buffalo a crossroads of the continent is vastly underused. Amtrak runs just eight trains daily between Buffalo and New York, four each way. And none of them use Central Terminal.

The platforms are rotted. But those platforms are key to the future of Buffalo and the region.

Renovating Central Terminal isn’t just about saving a beautiful building. It’s about elevating Buffalo to its rightful place—at the center of a region, at the crossroads of a nation, alive with the buzz and energy of great trains.

It’s time for New York to create a state railway program big and bold enough to make this happen.

Why did the Terminal close?

Trains on the Chicago-New York route now use the Depew station, which sits in an industrial park roughly 10 miles east of the city center. The move there in 1979 was about cutting costs—not serving passengers. With Amtrak offering just skeletal service, it was hard to justify such a big station.

Meanwhile, trains serving Niagara Falls also stop at Exchange Street, a small station located under I-190. Both Depew and Exchange are monuments to the defunding of train service in the late twentieth century, when highways consumed the vast majority of transportation budgets at every level.

It’s time to change that. We need to establish train service that requires—and supports—a much bigger footprint than the Depew and Exchange St. stations.

Creating local and regional synergies

The nonprofit Central Terminal Restoration Corp. is already making the economics work.

It describes the Terminal as “the people’s palace” and “the most loved building in Buffalo and Western NY.” And it aims to re-establish Central Terminal as a mixed-use hub with offices, artist studios, startups, small businesses, and even housing.

To become that kind of hub, Central Terminal needs to become a functioning train station. Trains will make it core to the city’s identity—and spur local development—by bringing thousands of people to the station, day in and day out.

Central Terminal sits between downtown and the airport, after all, and there’s plenty of land nearby. Couple that with the fact that the Central Terminal could be a stop on a potential light tail line connecting downtown Buffalo to “Larkinville”, a community entertainment hub, and the Buffalo-Niagara International Airport. Trains will boost local development efforts, and those developments will boost train ridership.

Great trains will spark synergies across the region, as well, by making Buffalo’s most iconic building easily accessible to millions of people across the Northeast and Midwest.

Many will pass through on their way to other destinations. But many will come to explore the building, the neighborhood, and the city.

In short, running eight trains through Central Terminal every hour is the single best way to transform the people’s palace into a place where people want to work, play, and spend money.

And that’s the best way to introduce them to Buffalo as a community where they can imagine building a life.

Why Buffalo Central?

Central Terminal was sited where it is for good reason: It’s the best place for a train station in Buffalo. That was true in 1929. And it’s still true today:

• It’s the only place with enough land to build a multi-track platform area.
• It’s well-located, based on the mainlines entering Buffalo from multiple directions.
• It’s well situated as a stop on a potential light-rail line that links downtown Buffalo to the Airport.
• It has room for connecting buses.

To be clear, the new Exchange St. Station, opened in 2020, is a big improvement and should stay in service for trains to Niagara Falls. But, it won’t work as the “hub” station because the track configuration makes it inaccessible to trains running between Chicago/Cleveland and New York City. And the site it sits on is just too small.

Central Terminal—unlike Depew and Exchange St.—is large enough for a multitrack station with high-level platforms long enough to serve high-speed trains.

That’s why the Central Terminal renovation and the upgraded service must be conceived and planned as a single, interconnected project.

The current stations can’t handle the train frequency that Buffalo should have. And investing in Central Terminal without sharply increasing Amtrak’s train frequency makes no sense.

What will it take?

Understanding the steps needed to get the station into working order requires distinguishing between sections of the facility.

• The main station building, ancillary buildings, and surrounding roads are owned by the Central Terminal Restoration Corp., which is working towards adaptive re-use of the buildings.
• The unused concourse, platforms, and tracks are owned by Amtrak (pictured above.)
• CSX owns the mainline separating the two. The bridge between the station building and the concourse was demolished in 1981 to allow double-stack container trains to pass through.

Here is one potential scenario that the New York Department of Transportation could lead, and the legislature could fund, to make the station great. This is an extremely ambitious “to-do” list, given the paltry state of New York’s railway program. But if we want serious mode-shift from cars to trains, we have to set the bar high—and push the state to do it.

1. Amtrak rebuilds the concourse with all passenger related facilities, like ticketing, waiting lounge, and checked baggage within the concourse.
2. Amtrak rebuilds the platforms to the wider standards in use today and raises them for level boarding. Access to and through the concourse would need to facilitate quick connections between trains arriving on pulse schedules.
3. Amtrak builds new tracks to serve those platforms. Additional track work will be needed to integrate the station with new, passenger-dedicated tracks to the east and CSX’s mainline, without interfering with their operations.
4. Amtrak works with CSX to build a new bridge linking the concourse to the main station building.
5. Central Terminal Restoration Corp. facilitates a steady stream of passengers walking through the main station and develops retail within the station building to serve their needs, as well as local residents.
6. Central Terminal Restoration Corp. works with Niagara Frontier Transportation Authority to build bus bays for local and intercity buses. (And, hopefully, light rail to the airport.)

Start with the Empire Corridor

We are advocating for hourly departures to Cleveland, Toronto, and along the Southern Tier to New York, but the Empire Corridor—along the Erie Canal—is the place to start.

The state’s most recent study of the corridor, released in 2023, notes that it “runs along the population and economic spine of the state.” Nearly 20 million people—more than 80 percent of New York’s population—live within 30 miles of the corridor. All six of the state’s biggest metro areas are situated right on it (New York, Buffalo, Rochester, Yonkers, Syracuse, and Albany).

These are all located on congested highways and situated too close together for a flight to make sense, financially or time-wise. All would benefit immensely from the transit-oriented development—especially affordable-housing efforts—that trains are great at spurring.

As the report puts it, “convenience of efficient rail travel will contribute to the accessibility of these communities, enhancing their economic and cultural vitality and supporting local and regional economic development efforts.”

In short, the Empire Corridor is an incredible yet almost completely untapped asset. New York has already recognized this by investing in studies to upgrade it.

Now, the path forward is clear. New York needs to work with the city of Buffalo on planning—and funding—a restored Central Terminal that can handle eight trains per hour. Simultaneously, it needs to make a plan for—and fund—rebuilding the third and fourth mainlines between Buffalo and Albany.

This is doable. The beautiful Art Deco terminal, the land for new platforms, the corridor with tens of millions of people, and the preliminary studies to improve it already exist. What’s missing is an ambitious plan—and the funding to make it happen.

It’s time to build. Renovating Central Terminal into a working train station is the most visible, symbolic, and immediately achievable place to start. It’s a concrete, high-impact first step that will prove the state is serious about the railroad future.

The people’s palace has waited long enough. Let’s bring the trains home.