New York’s “Train Daddy” is coming home.
Former NYC Transit President Andy Byford — who infamously resigned after clashing with then-Gov. Andrew Cuomo — has been brought on by the White House to take over the long-delayed revamp of Penn Station.
Byford, now an executive at Amtrak, will oversee one of the most prominent transit projects in the country, White House officials confirmed Friday.
The move, first reported by Our Town, puts the British transit official on a collision course with MTA Chair Janno Lieber, who had the project torn away from his agency last month by US Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy.
Duffy instead put the feds in charge of the gold-plated makeover for the decrepit transit hub, giving the massive job to Amtrak, where Byford has worked as Senior Vice President of High-Speed Rail since 2023.
“President Trump has made it clear: The days of reckless spending and blank checks are over,” Duffy said in April.
Byford, who has also led the Sydney, Toronto and London systems, was run out of New York in 2020 by Cuomo, less than two years after the governor brought him on to steer the subways out of the depths of the 2017 “Summer of Hell.”
Byford said at the time that Cuomo — who is now running for New York City mayor — undermined him to the point that his job became “intolerable.”
“I found myself excluded from meetings that were absolutely about the day-to-day running of New York City Transit,” Byford said at the time.
Cuomo received a torrent of hate mail from New Yorkers in the days after Byford’s shock resignation – with many of the missives blaming the governor’s notoriously ego-driven leadership for the popular Brit’s exit.
Under Byford’s leadership, the subways had hit their highest on-time performance in six years.
Cuomo’s successor, Gov. Kathy Hochul, released a statement Friday cheering the news that Byford was being tapped for the job.
“I’m very pleased to be working with the newly-appointed Andy Byford, who has a distinguished career in transit and infrastructure, and hope he is able to use these skills to deliver a beautiful, on-time, federally funded Penn Station renovation that New Yorkers can be proud of,” she said.
Hochul last month sarcastically celebrated Trump’s hostile takeover of the Penn Station overhaul, by effectively saying she was glad the money pit was now the feds’ problem, and pulling more than $1 billion in state funding from the project.
“Governor Hochul has welcomed the Trump Administration’s decision to step up and make good on its commitment to advance and finance this project,” said MTA Chief of Policy and External Relations John J. McCarthy.
“We look forward to working with Andy Byford, who understands the importance of mass transit.”
