SEPTA’s 30th Street stop getting an upgrade thanks to federal grant

A $15 million federal grant will give SEPTA’s 30th Street subway stop an upgrade, another step in the larger plan to modernize the transit hub at 30th Street Station, officials announced Thursday.

The money came from a Department of Transportation BUILD grant, and is supplementing $21 million from SEPTA and $2 million from Brandywine Realty Trust, one of the developers working on the 30th Street Station project.

SEPTA’s upgrades for the subway station include a new elevator at 30th Street, a new head house at the stairway near 31st Street, platform widening, and new escalators.

The work is the first phase of a $37 million upgrade of the site by 2020, and complements a $6.5 billion project to remake 30th Street Station and the land around it.

“This grant will finance improvements that make travel in the city easier for millions of commuters and visitors," said U.S. Sen. Pat Toomey, who supported SEPTA’s grant application, in a statement Thursday.

The 30th Street Station improvements also include plans to reopen and renovate a tunnel connecting the subway and five trolley lines that intersect there to the Amtrak station. All of SEPTA’s 13 Regional Rail lines also converge on 30th Street Station.

Presently, getting from the subway stop to the train station requires exiting one station and walking across the street to the other.

The project is adjacent to the 6.9-million-square-foot Schuylkill Yards development, which is expected to bring 1.6 million square feet of residential development and almost 400,000 square feet of retail and hotel space.