(The following story by David Knopf appeared on The Kansas City Star website on January 9.)
KANSAS CITY, Mo. — Phil Estes, project manager for Olathe’s $39 million rail elevation project, has learned to be patient.
Even with an important milestone approaching — the railroad hopes to see the first elevated southbound freight pass over Ridgeview, Santa Fe, Park and Loula on Jan. 18 — Estes isn’t counting his coal cars until he hears a lonesome whistle.
“It’s one of those dates,” he says, “and all you need is a good snow and it changes.”
Estes should know. Snowfall in late December was one of several delays in a project undertaken to erase traffic delays on east-west roads. If all goes well, Estes says, the second of the two elevated tracks, this one running northbound, is scheduled to open on Valentine’s Day.
When the second track opens, years of delays — some would say pain — will finally be over.
“We’ll have a love fest out there,” jokes Estes, a longtime Olathe resident who understands the community’s frustration.
“East-west is a major problem in this town,” he says. “I think it compartmentalizes our economy and compartmentalizes our neighborhoods.”
Jerry Trader, manager of Cottman Transmissions, 1005 E. Santa Fe, couldn’t agree more.
Trader said access in and out of the business is frequently blocked by traffic waiting for trains to pass. When an employee test drives a customer’s car, Trader says a train delay hurts the bottom line.
“(If) I’ve got a man going west on Santa Fe, I’m paying him to sit in traffic,” says Trader. “That hurts productivity.”
Residents and business owners consistently ask Estes when the project will be done — either that or they call city hall for updates, said Tim Danneberg, spokesman for the city manager’s office.
When both tracks are finally elevated, crews will turn their attention to tearing out the existing tracks and substantially lowering the roadway on Loula and Park under the elevated tracks. Santa Fe and Ridgeview will also be lowered, but to a lesser extent. The lowered roads will allow traffic to pass freely beneath the elevated tracks.
And that should ease frustration, both for drivers affected by delays and surrounding stores that deal with loud train horns and lost business.
Trader has personally experienced it all.
“It seems in the morning I’m always running late when a train comes and I have to sit there,” he says. “And it’s hard to conduct business. Some of the engineers are OK, but there are others who’ll lay on that horn all the way from Loula to Ridgeview.”
When elevation work began in August 2006, it was estimated that roughly 7,000 vehicles a day were blocked by the 40 trains that crossed the four streets. The delays were said to add up to 580 hours of lost time a day, a total that’s grown in just a year and a half. Forty-four trains a day now pass through Olathe on Burlington Northern Santa Fe’s Ft. Scott Subdivision, says Estes, and changes in trade and transportation patterns are likely to bring more increases.
“It’s like a four-lane freeway between Chicago and L.A.,” he says of the BNSF tracks that pass through Olathe.
Elevating trains won’t completely erase Olathe’s rail-related woes, but it will go a long way toward improving them. Another 88 trains pass through town on BNSF’s Emporia Subdivision track west of downtown, but noise is more of an issue there than delays.
Help is on the way in that part of town, too. Train horns that now sound 88 times a day at each crossing will be reduced once the city meets safety requirements that allow BNSF to establish “quiet zones” downtown.
For now, Estes is looking forward to having even one track elevated.
“When that happens we’ll tear our track one below and that will give us room to work,” he says. “That’s the scenario we have to go through to get both tracks done.”
And the result, Estes says, will be a sigh of relief and a new lease on life for the downtown business district.
“I think you’re going to see a renaissance in this area,” he says.