Amtrak Julie, Meet Penn Station Sheila

She doesn’t have as a high a profile as Amtrak Julie — that media suckup — but she’s every bit as important, and probably more so, since people actually use Penn Station:

The voice that launched a thousand trips — on Thursday alone — was about to launch another.

Sheila Herriott, sitting in a dimly lighted control room with a microphone in her hand and hundreds of commuters at her beck and call, spoke in a throaty, cabaret-style voice that sent them scurrying toward various tracks throughout Pennsylvania Station: “This will be the final call on Amtrak’s Train 97, the Silver Meteor, en route to Miami departing at 3:15 p.m., making station stops at Alexandria, Richmond, Petersburg . . . . This will be the final call on the Silver Meteor to Miami departing at 3:15 p.m. All aboard.”

Basking in the glow of her computer screen, Ms. Herriott rolled her chair away from her desk and looked up at a half-dozen video monitors to see her audience chugging for their trains.

“Those people really depend on me,” she said. “They don’t know me personally, but over the years, they have certainly come to know my voice.”

For the past quarter-century, millions who have passed through Penn Station have indeed relied on Ms. Herriott for arrival and departure information regarding Amtrak and New Jersey Transit trains.

. . .

Ms. Herriott, who began making track announcements in 1983, said she felt “every bit a part of the history and tradition of Penn Station.”