Rail plan roils St. Louis Park, Minn.

Adding yet another voice to the chorus objecting to a proposed increase in freight rail traffic in St. Louis Park, Minn., the city's school board weighed in last week with its concerns, the Star Tribune reports. At a special meeting, the board passed a resolution in full support of two resolutions passed recently by the City Council.

The council voted
unanimously against rerouting freight rail traffic from Minneapolis to St.
Louis Park to make room for the proposed Southwest light rail line. The light
rail trains are to run between Minneapolis and Eden Prairie.

Both the City Council and
the school board are urging Hennepin County leaders to reopen their study of
options for shifting freight rail traffic in order to make way for the proposed
light-rail line.

"We really just want
a fair shake on this," said school board member Rolf Peterson.
"Certainly, our students deserve it."

Topping the list of
school officials’ concerns is the safety of students, followed by worries about
increased noise and vibrations from more trains running more often.

The plan to reroute
freight rail traffic from the Kenilworth neighborhood of Minneapolis to St. Louis
Park would send the trains along tracks that run 75 feet from the high school,
Peterson said.

The county has said there
isn’t space to add light rail to the 62-foot wide corridor between Cedar Lake
and Lake of the Isles in Minneapolis. That corridor currently has a popular
bike-pedestrian trail and a freight rail line.

A 2009 Hennepin County
study evaluated six alternatives for rerouting freight traffic. The study
concluded that the best option was to move the freight trains to the
north-south Minneapolis, Northfield and Southern Railway tracks, located west
of Hwy. 100 in St. Louis Park.

Currently, two freight
trains run along the city’s MNS line a day. That would increase to six to eight
freight trains.