nothin Decades Later, RR Safety Arms Coming | New Haven Independent

Decades Later, RR Safety Arms Coming

Allan Appel Photo

Zinn at the crossing.

Giovanni Zinn was in fifth grade back in 1995 when the state initiated an upgrade of the Grand Avenue railroad level crossing—a plan to replace the flashing lights with a serious set of safety arms that will drop and physically prevent you from crossing the tracks when a train nears and crosses.

Twenty-one years later, the arms still haven’t arrived, but may soon. Zinn, who grew up to become New Haven’s city engineer, is overseeing that process.

The 250 feet of Grand Avenue running east from James Street has been closed to car traffic since Sept. 26 for the below-the-street prep work. Zinn said it should reopen at the end of October.

When completed, that brief run of the avenue will have a new surface, completely repaved and rebuilt with new sidewalks. Below that surface will be a carefully laid out forest of relocated utility, power, cable, and other lines.

They had to be re-routed from their previous position high above the adjacent utility poles to run beneath the new crossing, which itself has been raised three inches and enhanced with a rubberized surface surrounding the track.

It was necessary to put the lines and conduits under the track just for the distance of the crossing. They emerge to resume their position atop poles on either side of the crossing — in order to make room for the crossing arms when they are in the vertical position, Zinn said.

The price tag of the whole job is $1.175 million. But it costs the city only Zinn and other staffers’ time. Federal money, routed through the state, will reimburse city’s other expenses for the project: $541,000 for rebuilding the street, putting in new granite curbs, catch basins and pipes, for example.

The balance of the total cost is for the installation of the safety arms themselves, to be paid by Providence and Worcester Railroad Company, owner of the tracks and crossing.

Those arms won’t be up yet when the road reopens. Expect to see them fully installed in early 2017, Zinn said.

Zinn said that the new arms, to be placed on either side of the track where the light posts currently stand, will be nearly identical to what you see on city bridges across waterways when they close for boat traffic.

Two long arms, accompanied by the flashing lights, will extend both over the road and the sidewalks on both sides to prevent both vehicular and pedestrian traffic from crossing.

The arms should be installed by this coming Spring, according to P&W General Counsel Charles Rennick. In an email message, Rennick gave the technical terms for the new arms: “We are installing one signal cantilever with gate arm, one signal mast with gate arm, and two pedestrian gates.”

The railroad carries “mixed freight, including aggregates, steel, and vegetable oil” through the Grand Avenue crossing “five days a week, multiple times a day,” he reported.

When the arms are installed, most of that work will be off the prepared road, so only minor and perhaps no additional disruption of traffic flow on Grand should be expected, Zinn said.

Three hundred people are reported killed annually at those level crossings across the country.

While he was not aware of any accidents at the Grand Avenue crossing, “you want to be proactive,” Zinn said.

While there were a lot of wires, cables, and conduits to move, some, like a line carrying home oil from the Magellan terminal in the port, were positioned just so, and did not have to be touched.

The project is on pretty much on schedule for the road work to be completed by the end of the month, Zinn said. That is so in no small part because of coordination among United Illuminating, Comcast, Frontier Communications and the other owners of the wires and cables.

Utility coordination is key to any project in civil engineering,” he added.

The area is industrial, and the project hasn’t involved much inconvenience to retail establishments, Zinn said. His many visits to the work site impressed him with how much pedestrian and bicycle traffic occurs on the road

He is pleased that the state Department of Transportation stuck to its schedule and the upgrade program, he said, although he was not aware of its beginnings back in fifth grade.

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