On a chilly Tuesday afternoon, 10 years from its first warm twinkling in an engineer’s eye, after countless meetings between Auburn, various state and federal agencies and the Burlington Northern Santa Fe Railroad, the $22.5 million M Street Southeast grade-separation project between 4th and 6th streets southeast took its first step.
That is, numerous officials marched up to the microphone under a tent at the foot of Highway 18 to talk about a mind-numbing funding process now complete, praise partnerships that made it happen, then grip golden shovels and turn the first dirt.
Terry Finn, director of government relations for BNSF, recounted one of the rarest marvels of all.
“Mayor Lewis and the Council, you actually got the railroad to cough up $18 or $20 million dollars … and that’s quite a miracle in itself,” said Finn.
“Sometimes miracles do happen,” responded Auburn Mayor Pete Lewis.
Actual street construction may begin as early as late April or early May. The City will notify the public 30 days before it closes the streets there.
The Fast Corridor project calls for separating M Street Southeast from the at-grade rail crossing by building a railroad bridge, raising the tracks four feet and lowering M Street under the rail line. At the same time, it takes what until now has been a two-lane roadway and adds lanes and a turn-pocket for 4th Street. Construction also calls for bike lanes and sidewalks.
Multiple sources, including the federal and state governments, the Ports of Tacoma and Seattle, and BNSF are contributing funds.
Stoking the fire under the collective rump is BNSF’s 18-year-old plan to reopen its Stampede Pass Line to longer freight trains and improve the Pass tunnel. Completion of that work will push 20 trains daily, some of them a half-mile long and moving at five miles an hour, through Auburn.
“From a regional standpoint, the reason we are getting state funding and why the ports are putting money into this is because they want to be able to use these tracks for heavier, longer trains and want to put more trains on the tracks,” Project Manager Jacob Sweeting recently told the Auburn Reporter. “Without the grade separation, the impacts to the roadway would be too much. Without it, in the near future Auburn would see many trains crossing at that location, and that whole side of town would be completely gridlocked, and the congestion would spill onto Auburn Way South and onto SR 18 and SR 167.”
The bottleneck is under SR 18. There are no sidewalks there, and traffic narrows to two lanes. It’s a dangerous area. The City gets calls all the time, especially from people who live in King County Housing Authority housing, Sweeting said.
The maximum depth of the new construction will be about 21 feet below the existing street level. The wall is expected to be about 25 feet high at the maximum, although the walls on either side of the street will be about the same height.
To provide room for the project, the City of Auburn bought 10 full properties and portions of the roadway frontage, eight of them on the east side of M Street and 23 other properties.
The project also calls for the addition of stormwater detention and treatment facilities, landscaping and other aesthetic treatments.
Improved conditions
City officials cite numerous benefits:
• Elimination of safety hazards, including those that face the 50 school buses that cross the BNSF tracks at that location every day.
• Elimination of the possibility of pedestrian-train accidents with the addition of the sidewalks and pedestrian crossings.
• Abatement of sound pollution. With the tracks separated from the street, engineers will no longer need to lay on the horns every time they cross.
• Safety improvements. The pavement in the project area is in poor condition, and its replacement, designed to handle traffic loading for the next 25 to 30 years, should be much quieter and safer.
The $12.5 A Street Northwest connection between 3rd Street Northwest and 14th Street Northwest also emerged from the 1994 Stampede Pass study. It will create a parallel route along the BNSF mainline tracks and connect the 15th Street and the Third Street grade separations. Two other projects, the 3rd Street Grade Separation and the 277th Street grade separation, are done.
The A Street connection will allow people actually get back and forth across the BNSF tracks when the Stampede Pass rail is operating and trains are on the tracks, alleviating overall congestion through the train tracks. It also connects a route from downtown Auburn not only to the 15th Street Northwest business district but all the way up to 277th Street via B Street. When that’s done, it will result in another almost complete north-south connector between the northern edge of the city and the downtown. Most of the funding is federal grants. Big chunk is donated work from developer and donated right of way the City already has.
“This is another sign of what we are trying to achieve in Auburn,” Lewis said. “This is one of our oldest projects that we started … Here is another sign of the progress that we’re making.”
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BY THE NUMBERS
The M Street Grade-Separation Project will:
• Lower the roadway by about 20 feet.
• Move 40,000 cubic yards of material or 150,000 wheelbarrows.
• Relocate and rebuild almost two miles of underground sewer, storm, water and electrical utilities.
• Reconstruct more than 3,000 feet of railroad tracks with two side-by-side, 100-foot-long steel bridges.
• Build almost a mile of sidewalk where there are no sidewalks, or the sidewalks are falling apart.
• Build more than 22,000-square-feet of retaining wall, about half the size of a football field.
• Create or sustain 800 jobs.
• Over the next 20 years, for every $1 spent on the project, realize more than $20 of benefit, for a total net benefit of more than $440 million at the end of a 20-year span.
• Reduce the amount of time that people wait for trains by more than 3,000 hours per day, saving more than $2 million gallons of fuel in a two-year period.
Source: Project Manager, Jacob Sweeting
