(The following article by Tom Bell was posted on the Portland Press Herald website on July 27.)
KENNEBUNK, Me. — With the Downeaster sidelined by the National Democratic Convention, work crews are busy fixing the worst stretch of the Portland to Boston line. They are removing 5,000 tons of clay and replacing it with a liquid fill that hardens into artificial bedrock.
The $900,000 project will allow trains to travel faster over a notoriously slow and bumpy 1,400-foot-long section near Route 1 in Kennebunk. The clay here is so deep and lies so close to the surface that the rails would visibly sink as trains passed over. The maximum speed is 30 mph.
Crews on Saturday moved the tracks to the side and are now digging a quarter-mile-long, seven-foot-deep trench. In place of the clay, they are pouring a “flowable fill,” a mixture of sand and cement that hardens in 24 hours.
Project Manager Paul Pottle said the rail had been floating on top of the deep pocket of marine clay, which is soft and holds water.
Even after digging down seven feet, crews were still digging up clay, he said.
“There is no bottom to it, unless you go deep enough,” he said, as he peered into the narrow pit. “So we engineered around it instead.”
Trains will be able to travel 79 mph in some sections, he said, but rail authorities say the maximum speed here will be 50. The train has been authorized to increase speed from 60 to 79 mph as it travels through Scarborough.
When the train service resumes Sunday, travel time between Boston and Portland will be shortened by five minutes, to two hours and 40 minutes. The train will be leaving Portland five minutes later than the current schedule. Arrivals in Portland will be five minutes earlier. Boston arrival and departure times will be the same.
Next year, after additional rail improvements and schedule changes, the rail authority expects to shorten the travel time to two hours and 30 minutes. The rail authority also plans to add a fifth round trip to give passengers more options.
Critics say the current schedule, which offers only four round trips daily, has resulted in long gaps between trains and makes the service much less convenient than private bus service, which offers trips every hour.
Security concerns at the Democratic National Convention in Boston shut down North Station for a week. Putting the Downeaster on hold during the height of the tourist season will cost the Downeaster $100,000 in revenues, said Patricia Douglas of the Northern New England Passenger Rail Authority.
But the stoppage has allowed the rail authority to fix a section of track that has been a problem since the service began in December, 2001.
“We are trying to make the most of it,” she said.
Crews are working on different sections of the 114-mile-long line, but the stretch in Kennebunk is the busiest. There are 25 to 30 workers from CPM Constructors of Freeport and Guilford Rail has another 15. Each day, 15 dump trucks haul in about 300 loads of fill mixture and haul out clay.
The clay will be used as fill in Portland on the connector road between I-295 and Commercial Street.
Workers are working 12-hour days. Guilford is moving its freight at night when work stops. An unscheduled Guilford work train Monday morning derailed as it slowly approach the work site. Pottle said the train derailed over the clay pocket. The ground was so soft the tracks had separated, he said, illustrating the rail bed’s problems.
Crews are ahead of schedule and will finish their work by Sunday’s deadline, he said.
“There are a lot of people being thrown at this over a short period of time,” he said.