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While the Missouri Department of Transportation has been working on investigating the Mississippi riverbed for the location of bridge piers, the Illinois Department of Transportation has been busy working on the tangled web of railroads and utility lines running through the bridge approach area.
Initial plans were to relocate the railroads running through the area, but that turned out to be an insurmountable task. According to Brooks Brestal, IDOT’s deputy project manager for the New Mississippi River bridge project, the cost of moving the railroads was staggering.
There are five railroads running in the half mile closest to the river in that area: Terminal Railroad Association, Union Pacific, Kansas City Southern, Norfolk Southern and CFX. Brestal said it would be much easier if the railroads could have been consolidated in order to shorten the length of the bridges running over them. Plus, it would be much cheaper to build roads on grade than to elevate them. But once they started talking to the railroads about consolidating, it simply became too cumbersome to get all the railroads to agree.
“There’s a rail line on the east end of this project that to relocate that and push it further west would have triggered about $100 million worth of railroad relocation,” Brestal said. “You take that $100 million off the $600 million that we have, and you only have $500 million left to build the roadways and things. It was just impractical.”
The decision was made to work with the railroads in place and to elevate a longer stretch of the roadway in order to save both time and money.
“It was not only the money, but the time and effort it was taking to try and get the railroads to agree on something,” Brestal said. “Part of the issue is each railroad has its own legal staff. To try to get all of those groups to agree, we just determined at some point that it wasn’t going to happen in a timely manner - and our project just wasn’t moving forward.”
Brestal said that IDOT is close to agreements with four of the railroads. He recently sent a proposal to the fifth and hopes to be able to work things out with it soon.
Another large piece of the puzzle that IDOT is working on now is utilities. A myriad of utilities crisscross the area, said Brestal, and moving them is expensive, so the plan is to minimize the amount that needs to be relocated.
“For example,” he said, “Illinois American Water has huge distribution water lines in there. They’re older pipes. They still work, but when you start to get into a situation where you want to relocate those, they can be very cumbersome and expensive to move. So it’s best to just leave those where they are and design away from them, similar to what we’ve done with the railroads.”
One utility that can’t be designed around, though, is AmerenUE and its distribution lines. Brestal said Ameren has a tower line that runs along the river, and where those lines exist today is where the cables for the new bridge are going to go.
“As soon as we determine where the piers are going to go on Terminal Railroad property, we’ll line up some new towers for Ameren to put its distribution line there,” said Brestal. “That way we’re only affecting one corridor through Terminal’s property with both our bridge pier and the new utility relocation. That’s some of the coordination that needs to take place. That’s why it’s important to get Terminal on board now, so then we can find a place for Ameren to go also.”
All told, the utility relocations on the Illinois side are expected to total between $20 million and $22 million, according to Brestal.
Another massive undertaking is property acquisition. Brestal said approximately 100 parcels need to be purchased for the entire Illinois side at a cost of $15 million to $17 million. IDOT began making offers on the property last month and expects the entire process to take up to two years.
Related to that is archeological investigation. Because of the historical significance of this area of the American Bottom, IDOT expects to spend around $5 million over the next two years on archeological investigation and excavation.
“We’ve already excavated about 40 places on the old stockyards property,” Brestal said. “They gave us permission to get in before we acquired it, and the archeologists have been digging pits and excavating certain artifacts from probably about 1,000 to 1,200 years ago.”
Brestal said contracts will go out to bid near the end of 2009 and some portions of the project will start in early 2010. He said that once IDOT has worked out the agreements with the utility companies and the railroads, it can let the main bridge contract, because there’s quite a bit of work that can be done by the contractor before those utilities become part of the critical path. Likewise, near the Interstate 64 interchange, bridges at Exchange Avenue and 15th Street and a pedestrian bridge near 15th Street can be started before a lot of the major utilities need to be moved.
“You can’t think of this as just one project like you do other smaller projects,” Brestal said. “This is going to be a series of about 20 contracts that all make up the New Mississippi River Bridge project.”
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