A development team made up of Related Cos, Vornado Realty LP and Skanska AB was chosen by New York state to finish a decades-long plan to turn a landmark Manhattan post office into a railway station with stores and offices. The $1.6 billion project to transform the Farley Post Office Building, a Beaux Arts landmark on the West Side of Manhattan near Pennsylvania Station, will begin this fall, Governor Andrew Cuomo said in a presentation to the Association for a Better New York. A new 255,000 square-foot Moynihan Train Hall, named after former New York Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, will house passenger facilities for the Long Island Rail Road and Amtrak. The station, bigger than Grand Central Station on 42nd Street, is projected to be finished in December 2020, Cuomo said. The hall will also have 700,000 square feet of office and retail space. “This is not a plan,” Cuomo said. “I don’t announce plans with caveats. This is what’s going to happen.”  Cuomo also said the Metropolitan Transportation Authority will redesign the LIRR’s existing 33rd street concourse at Penn Station, which the governor compared to LaGuardia Airport, a “national laughingstock.” The MTA will also renovate the the Seventh and Eighth Avenue subway stations. “Penn Station is the train version of LaGuardia. It is decrepit and it’s an affront to riders forced to use it,” Cuomo said. Amtrak owns Penn Station. The redesign will triple the width of the existing corridor, which Cuomo said reminded him of catacombs, and raise the ceiling by two feet, to 18 feet. The ceiling will be an LED screens lining the ceilings will show blue skies and clouds. Moynihan and Penn Station will be connected by an underground concourse.  “It gives you sense of openness as opposed to claustrophobia and suffocation that you now get,” Cuomo said. Related, Vornado and Skanska will pay the state about $600 million for commercial and retail rights at the new train station. New York’s economic development agency will spend $570 million and $425 million will come from a combination of Amtrak, LIRR, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey and the federal government.