A plea to the President I

Dear Mr. President, Welcome home. Welcome back to where you were born and grew up and built your business and raised your family. Welcome back to the place you know better than anywhere in the world. You are fortunate to travel in and out of Manhattan by Marine Corps helicopter. The job has perks, as being a billionaire did.

But hundreds of thousands of your constituents in New Jersey and Long Island have to suffer on trains to and from Penn Station.

Penn, where commuting conditions have gone of late from bad to worse to hair-rippingly horrible.

Penn, where, after equipment failures, commuters are bracing for 44 days of track shutdowns this summer to supposedly get things straight. Penn, where, sewage poured from the ceiling. Talk about a swamp in need of draining. Want to be the hero? Start by getting federally controlled Amtrak, the (very) little railroad that just couldn’t, to end its reign at Penn.

Amtrak’s ownership of the busiest rail hub in the Western Hemisphere is a remnant of the 1970 Penn Central bankruptcy, which you know well, having picked up several major pieces in Manhattan (the 30th St. and 60th St. yards and the Commodore Hotel).

New York State, through the MTA, acquired another piece, Grand Central. It’s now in ship shape.

But Amtrak, which carries a only 8% of the passengers but calls all the shots, has made a hash of it at Penn. Ask your family and friends about it. Ask your transportation secretary, Elaine Chao, who grew up on Long Island and often rides up from Washington to visit her dad.

Ask anyone. The answers will be the same: Chaotic, confusing, dirty, unorganized, terrible.

Amtrak is the culprit because it’s in charge, yet it has no capital funding plan. No expertise in commuter rail. Especially hide-bound union rules. It ekes by hand-to-mouth, hostage to a fickle Congress (you know them).

Pry Penn away from Amtrak by forcing a sale or transfer to New York State. The Amtrak board of directors is composed of the secretary of transportation and eight other presidential appointees.

“I alone can fix it,” you said during the Republican National Convention.

Maybe not true of all of America writ large. But here, with Amtrak and the place-worse-than-purgatory that is Penn, you’ve got a point.