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Lehi • Contractors building the FrontRunner commuter-rail line between Provo and Salt Lake City closed off Main Street in this northern Utah County city last week to lay rails and upgrade the crossing for a small segment of the 44-mile-long route.
The work was finished on time and the road reopened late on Oct. 1, said Utah Transit Authority Project Manager Steve Meyer. But the work here represents only a tiny portion of the $850 million project that still has nearly four years to go before trains are hauling passengers between the two cities.
The route follows Union Pacific's 100-foot-wide right of way through the area. UTA purchased a 20-foot swath of that single-track route to add its own tracks. The centers of the two lines will be only 15 feet apart.
"That's really close, and it's a big issue," said Meyer. "We're both [U.P. and UTA] confident we can safely be in their corridor."
In some places, the corridor is too narrow for two sets of tracks, so UTA has to purchase 560 parcels of private land to maintain the proper distance between the parallel rails and to make room for stations.
"These are just slivers of land for the most part," Meyer said. Most of the parcels have been acquired, some sales are pending and others, primarily in Salt Lake Valley, still must be acquired. Most sellers are responsive to UTA's offers, he said, but some parcels will have to be acquired through the state's eminent-domain powers that force recalcitrant landowners to give up land for a "fair market price."
In Lehi, only one business appeared to be significantly affected by the Main Street closure.
Ashley McKinnon, owner of Modernly Vintage Boutique, located in the historic Lehi Hotel building a few dozen feet from the crossing, shut down for the week.
"Trucks are using our parking lot, there are piles of dirt and sand everywhere, and we knew we couldn't stay open," she said. A week's closure "won't hurt too badly," but her shop — selling boutique clothing, jewelry and home decor items — is a new business that has been open for only six weeks.
"I welcome FrontRunner. It's going to be nice for us in Utah County to have easy access to Salt Lake City," McKinnon said. "Shutting down for a week is not too bad. Any longer and we would have problems."
The work on Lehi's Main Street involved laying quarter-mile long sections of rail across the busy thoroughfare. The track, Meyer said, is delivered to construction sites in 80-foot lengths and then welded together in such a way as to keep the ride as smooth as possible for the FrontRunner trains.
The FrontRunner and UP trains will not share tracks, he said, so the iron for the commuter-rail system is lighter than the railroad's, which hauls freight and not passengers.
For example, a 3-foot section of FrontRunner track weights 115 pounds; the same length for UP's system weighs between 136 and 140 pounds, Meyer said.
UP crews are taking advantage of UTA's work at the crossing to upgrade their own facilities there. Workers are laying concrete pads between the two sets of rails and adjusting crossing signals to account for the addition of the second set of rails. When in operation, UP's signaling system will detect the presence of a train, whether it is FrontRunner or freight, and send a signal to the other side so both sets of flashing red lights and crossing arms go down at the same instant. The two systems back each other up.
Meyer is overseeing work being conducted south to north along the entire 44-mile route. Currently, 16 miles have been laid from Provo to American Fork.
The Lehi crossing falls between the Thanksgiving Point station, about four miles to the north, and the American Fork station four miles south. In all, six stations will be completed by 2014, with two others designated as future stops.
A major task for the builders is construction of 20 new bridges for automobile traffic over the two lines. Fourteen have been completed; work on two is under way and four others have yet to begin.
The bridge issue has made the commuter-rail line's construction more complex than the line between Salt Lake City and Pleasant View, north of Ogden. That segment, which opened in late April 2008, only required two bridges.
"Steve likes to say that the north line was a practice run for building the [more complicated] south line," said UTA spokesman Gerry Carpenter.
The Lehi crossing is at street level. And it is only two blocks east of a major roundabout that controls traffic for much of the area into and around the city.
Meyer said UTA and the Utah Department of Transportation, which oversees that roundabout, are in discussions about what do in the future if traffic through it increases to the point that vehicles could back up all the way to the rail crossing.
That could endanger motorists who may become trapped on the tracks when a train approaches and the crossing arms go down.
"There are two possible solutions," he said. "We could add a lane to the roundabout, or we could take it out and put in a traditional semaphore system."
That decision will be made before FrontRunner south starts operating in 2014.