Freight rail move to St. Louis Park gets more study

Written by jrood

In June, Hennepin County, Minn., will launch a nine-month, $200,000 study of the cost and community and environmental impacts of adding more traffic to the St. Louis Park tracks, the Minneapolis Star Tribune reports.

The question of rerouting
freight trains to make room for a new light-rail line between Minneapolis and
Eden Prairie hits home, almost literally, for Brian Zachek. Zachek’s St. Louis
Park house is just 30 feet from the freight tracks that could inherit the
displaced trains.

It may be necessary to
move them from the Kenilworth neighborhood in south Minneapolis, but shifting
them to the St. Louis Park tracks that run behind his and 184 other homes —
and within 20 feet of St. Louis Park High School — "just sounds like
insanity,” Zachek said.

In June, the county will
launch a nine-month, $200,000 study of the cost and community and environmental
impacts of adding more traffic to the St. Louis Park tracks, said Katie Walker,
principal planner of the rail line for Hennepin County.

Kenilworth freight trains
must be moved because the chosen route for the proposed light-rail line passes
through a 62-foot-wide corridor between Cedar Lake and Lake of the Isles.
Occupied now by freight trains and a popular pedestrian trail, there isn’t room
for light rail, Walker said.

Moving the freight trains
to St. Louis Park was the recommendation of a 2009 Hennepin County study that
evaluated six alternatives for rerouting the traffic. That study concluded that
the north-south Minneapolis, Northfield and Southern Railway tracks west of
Hwy. 100 in St. Louis Park made the most sense.

While the upcoming study
is set to focus just on St. Louis Park, affected residents and St. Louis Park
City Council Member Sue Sanger would like further review of other options.

"The county should
do a full assessment of all of the possible routes," she said, including a
comparison of alternatives by the density of housing, the proximity of housing
to tracks and the costs associated with mitigation. She said additional trains
will bring more noise, vibration, pollution and conflicts with traffic.

Judging by current use,
adding rail traffic to the MNS line would result in six to eight freight trains
daily through St. Louis Park. That’s up from two a day now. Walker estimates
four-to-six trains pass each day through Kenilworth.

Zachek said that rail
traffic behind his house is barely noticeable with two short trains a day, but the
trains rumbling through Kenilworth are longer and would bring more disruption.

His family lives so close
to the tracks that "if that train derailed and it was carrying something toxic
we would probably be killed,” he said.

St. Louis Park last
studied the issue in 1999, when the notion of shifting freight traffic seemed
distant.

The city shelved a report
that said: "If at a future date, it is determined that the Kenilworth Corridor
is the most feasible route for mass transit, and that freight rail and a mass
transit cannot coexist in that corridor, freight rail traffic will be rerouted
through St. Louis Park."

Although a light-rail
route is still far from certain, planning for the $1-billion Southwest Corridor
line is under way.

This month, the
Metropolitan Council is set to finalize the route. The next step is to seek federal
permission to begin preliminary engineering late this year or early next year. Environmental
impacts will be outlined in a draft report coming in September, Walker said.

Progress on the
light-rail plan has given the freight rail switch new urgency. More than 100 St.
Louis Park residents attended a briefing on the issue April 29 at St. Louis
Park High School.

"People were
shouting questions and demanding that the county do something to help St. Louis
Park," said Thom Miller, a resident who lives in the neighborhood bordering
the freight line.

"Why is St. Louis
Park being penalized and being abused by all this freight rail being shoved
down our throats?"

Some houses are 30 feet
from the tracks and some have garages 5 or 6 feet from the tracks, Miller said.

The Twin Cities &
Western Railroad freight line now running through Kenilworth lost its original
location along the Midtown Greenway when it was severed by the construction of
Hwy. 55 through south Minneapolis in the 1990s, Walker said.

At that time, Hennepin
County intended to relocate the traffic to St. Louis Park, but environmental
contamination was found on the Golden Auto property where the TCW and the MNS
lines were supposed to connect. Instead, the trains displaced by Hwy. 55 were
sent through Kenilworth.

Between 2006 and 2008,
the Golden Auto site was cleaned up and a public easement established on the
property for the freight line connection.

Hennepin County
Commissioner Gail Dorfman said the freight traffic change should be used to address
long-standing noise and safety issues and make the existing freight line more acceptable.

Dorfman, who represents
St. Louis Park and the Kenilworth neighborhood on the County Board, said she
would prefer not to bring more freight traffic to St. Louis Park. But she sees
it as a chance to "get it done right.”

Transportation issues are
always tough, she said.

"I go from getting
clobbered by Kenwood people because I am bringing them light rail to getting clobbered
by St. Louis Park people because they don’t want the freight rail,” she said.

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