NEW YORK — It's the morning rush on the first day of a new week, and New York Penn Station's controlled chaos is in full rant as tens of thousands of commuters hurtle toward the workday.

Inside the Penn Station Central Control center, dispatchers stare at the 75-foot-wide screen showing movements of trains from the Philadelphia outskirts to Long Island and try once more to do the improbable:

Funnel 1,200 trains a day through century-old tunnels into a maze-like station that has subways down below and is corked by Madison Square Garden.

"This ballet takes place every day," said Drew Galloway, chief of Northeast Corridor planning and performance for Amtrak, which owns the station and rents to NJ Transit.

Two blocks west of Penn Station, there is a small world that commuters never see.

It’s lit up with a 10-foot-tall display board in the primary colors of red, green and blue, plus yellow and orange, to signify train movements and tracks.

It’s inhabited by rows of dispatchers, whose eyes are constantly focused on the board, dealing with external factors that can produce some of the worst commuter entanglements in the world.

You wouldn’t know it by looking at the dispatchers, so unfazed they seem as if they are checking out books at the library instead of routing trains through North America’s busiest transit hub.

"We pay them to be calm and to handle whatever needs to be handled," said Phil Kaplan, assistant superintendent of operations for the Northeast Corridor in New York, a burly, straight-talking supervisor who has been there 37 years.

"It wouldn’t survive if it was chaos, it just wouldn’t," added Galloway, an Ocean County resident who helped Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama redevelop rail services within the Gulf States corridors and has more than 35 years in the rail industry.

The dispatchers are the St. Peters of the tracks — gatekeepers who decide whether your train can enter Manhattan, in a jigsaw puzzle of a transit hub that handles 650,000 people a day — twice as busy as America’s most-used airport in Atlanta and busier than Newark, LaGuardia and JFK airports combined.

Every day, these train station equivalents of air traffic controllers try to figure out how to fit 5 pounds of potatoes into a 3-pound sack.

Amtrak let The Star-Ledger visit the control center in Midtown Manhattan during the Monday morning rush.

The display board shows a system of tracks that crisscross like spaghetti and crawl into a station that was never expected to have so many passengers.

One incident — a tree falling onto a transmission wire in New Brunswick or the century-old Portal Bridge failing to close in Kearny — can have a domino effect that turns your commute into a horror.

During the visit to the control center, it became apparent why New Jersey passengers at Penn Station cannot count on their train arriving at the same track every day.

The stampede

One of the most maddening parts of waiting for a train at the station is the cattle call that ensues when a train gate assignment is listed. But unlike, say, Newark Penn Station, where you can always count on a train to the city arriving on Track 1, at New York Penn Station you get the train where the track is available.

"They have a program — it’s a guide — but there are so many variables down here it just takes one thing to happen, and there goes the apple cart," said Dennis Hamby, Amtrak’s superintendent of operations for the Northeast Corridor in New York. "Next thing you know, you’re putting (trains) wherever you can."

Dennis Hamby of Amtrak helps coordinate a daily "ballet" that involves moving 1,200 trains in and out of New York Penn Station, the busiest transit hub in North America.

On the big overhead display board at the control center, a red line signifies that a train is occupying a track at New York Penn Station and a green line signifies that a route is being requested. Moving yellow rectangles signify the trains.

Three hours into the morning rush, the display board still has more red than a matador’s convention.

"It’s all filled," Galloway said. "You’ll see that from 7 in the morning until 10 in the morning and from 4 in the afternoon until 7 at night."

Penn Station has 21 tracks that shoehorn trains into the station from four tunnels under the East River and two under the Hudson River.

Amtrak is hoping to build two additional tubes from Secaucus to the south side of an expanded New York Penn Station by 2025.

It would be called the "Gateway Tunnel," an alternative to NJ Transit’s ARC tunnel terminated three years ago by Gov. Chris Christie.

The Gateway Tunnel would allow 13 more NJ Transit trains during peak hours — for a total of 33 — and eight additional Amtrak trains.

NJ Transit now operates 332 trains into and out of New York Penn Station each weekday — nearly half of NJ Transit’s 697 trains a day, agency spokesman John Durso Jr. said.

During peak hours, he said, an NJ Transit train enters New York Penn Station every 150 seconds.

While long-term funding for the Gateway Tunnel has not been found, other work being done on Amtrak’s Northeast Corridor rail line between New Brunswick and Trenton will improve the Depression-era signals and the overhead electrical wires that power the trains, allowing more capacity on the line.

The upgrades are expected to allow train speeds of 160 mph — up from 135 mph now — while increasing reliability on a rail line where commuters have seen numerous delays caused by sagging or downed wires.

"You’re going to go from two or three trains an hour, in some respects, to 10 or 12 trains an hour," Galloway said.

Back at the control center, the display board is showing green, signifying two open slots inside Penn Station.

"That won’t stay for long," Galloway said, and soon after he said it, the board went red again.

Twice during the previous week, the East River tunnels were shut down for the entire morning rush.

The board had a big blue line, meaning the tracks were blocked.

Stranded for 3 hours

Kaplan can only recall one time where passengers had to be rescued from a train inside a tunnel. During a scary event on NJ Transit trains following a power outage two years ago, about 1,500 people were stranded for up to three hours on the last day of the summer, leading to the installation of fans in the tunnel and other safeguards.

But nothing could compare with Hurricane Sandy 13 months ago, when water from Long Island City infiltrated the East River tunnels.

"During Sandy we shut down; I had bodies here with nothing to do basically, because we weren’t running," Kaplan said.

Amtrak and the Long Island Rail Road share the control center; NJ Transit has one of its own in Kearny.

All three agencies have designated sections inside Penn Station.

Somehow, despite the mass of trains and humanity to move, the system usually works, racking up a more than 90-percent overall on-time performance.

Now it’s 9:30 a.m. on the first day of the workweek.

The morning hasn’t been without its problems. On the Jersey side, Montclair Line service was subject to delays of up to a half-hour in both directions due to "overhead wire problems" and Gladstone Line service was subject to delays of up to 15 minutes in both directions due to "signal problems."

But it has largely been a quiet morning. Not that you could tell the difference from the poker-face dispatchers.

Another morning miracle has come and gone.

"We just went though a rush hour here," Kaplan said. "Seamless."

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