The right track

IT alumni led the team of engineers who delivered Minnesota’s first light-rail line on time and under budget

by trisha collopy

Two weeks after the Twin cities bus strike ends in April, there's a quiet bubble of excitement on the Hiawatha light-rail line. Bells clang as the train slowly pulls up to the line's downtown Minneapolis stations. Train operators fill the car, "burning in" the new vehicle and logging training hours.

Sitting in one of the passenger seats, Jack Caroon, head of the Hiawatha Project Office, notices little details the train lingers too long at the stations, which means the signal timing is off. On this day, crews also are repainting the rails on the Metrodome station, after winter weather caused the first coat to peel.

For the last six years, Caroon (Civil '74) has led one of the largest public works projects undertaken by the state building the $715.3 million light-rail line. At the project's peak he directed a staff of 70 to 80 full-time employees and consultants in the Hiawatha Project Office and indirectly supervised the work of more than 350 contractors everyone from engineers to electricians to welders. He also coordinated work between two lead agencies, the Minnesota Department of Transportation (MnDOT), which built the line, and the Metropolitan Council, the line's eventual owner.

At the outset, he and his staff faced some huge unknowns. It was the state's first light-rail project and its first time supervising a design-build project, in which one contractor handles every phase of the project.

"Projects like this, from MnDOT's standpoint, are very complicated," Caroon says. "This is not your standard 'build a six-lane highway.'"

MnDOT veteran Vicki Barron (Civil '84, M.S.I.S. '03), the project's deputy manager, attended several early meetings before she joined the Hiawatha office.

"As an outsider looking in, I didn't think it was possible that we would ever get all the deadlines behind us," she says. Nevertheless, she and her colleagues including a core group of University graduates jumped at the chance to work on the region's first light-rail line.

'The stars lined up'

Politicians, urban planners, and rail advocates have kicked around the idea of a light-rail line in the Twin Cities for more than three decades. Past proposals have included light rail in the region's central corridor along University Avenue or Interstate 94, a line along Interstate 35W, and commuter rail lines such as the proposed Northstar line, which would run from Minneapolis to St. Cloud.

Barron, who wrote her senior paper on the debate over light rail, remembers the public discussion over a 1985 environmental impact statement (EIS) that identified light rail as the preferred transit alternative in the Hiawatha corridor. For her and many other young transportation engineers at the time, light rail held huge promise as a solution to the region's growing traffic congestion.

But the Hiawatha EIS sat on the shelf for more than 10 years while legislators and local politicians debated light rail's costs and benefits. In 1996 a group of MnDOT engineers dusted off the 1985 EIS and began holding public hearings for a busway in the Hiawatha corridor.

"The goal was to have some kind of transit alternative in the corridor," says Joe Gladke (Civil '94, M.S. '03), who worked on the project along with Caroon. "We thought light rail was still 20 years away."

This time, however, political momentum had shifted in favor of light rail. Key officials in Minneapolis and Hennepin County backed a proposed line between downtown Minneapolis and the airport. More federal funding had recently become available for light-rail projects, and Minnesota's senior congressional representatives, James Oberstar and Martin Sabo, were in a good position to get a piece of the pie. In 1997 Congress approved $20 million to start building a series of transitways in the Twin Cities. The next year state legislators approved $40 million for preliminary engineering of a light-rail line in the Hiawatha corridor.

"All the stars started lining up, politically and financially," says Gladke. Almost overnight the project jumped from a $44 million busway to a $400 million light-rail line. But securing preliminary funding was just the first hurdle.

"We had a window of time to get the project underway to get federal dollars. The push was to get construction underway fast to hit the envelope," says Caroon, who began running the Hiawatha Project Office in June 1998.

MnDOT scrambled to update the EIS for the new light-rail proposal. In order to meet the federal funding deadline, the state legislature allowed MnDOT to bid the light-rail line as a design-build project. MnDOT engineers had to get up to speed on the requirements for design-build contracts, which have a different set of rules than traditional design-bid-build contracts, in which one company designs and oversees compliance on a project and a second company, usually a construction firm, builds it.

The agency's veteran highway engineers also had to learn an entirely new set of guidelines for light rail. In the project's early days, Caroon crisscrossed the country, visiting light-rail projects in Portland (Oregon), Denver, Baltimore, and Dallas, where he spent a week working in the city's light-rail office. Gladke took a rail operations class at the University of Wisconsin. He would later travel to Pueblo, Colorado, to inspect the steelyard building the project's rail girders.

Sticking points

When Barron joined the project in May 1999, engineers were struggling to hammer out an alignment for the light-rail line and put together design specifications so the project could go out on bid. One of the thorniest issues was routing the line around Fort Snelling through multiple parcels of federal property, including land owned by the Veterans Administration, the National Guard, the General Services Administration, and others. Some buildings were protected by the state's historic preservation office. Environmentalists and other activists wanted to make sure the construction didn't disturb sensitive land near Minnehaha Falls.

"That was a nightmare," says Caroon, who spent more than a year bringing all the parties to the table. "Imagine working with seven different federal agencies and getting them to agree on an alignment."

Because the state has no right of eminent domain on federal property, MnDOT had to negotiate a trade for each segment of federal land. In one instance, the proposed route ran through a dilapidated army building used mostly for storage. Instead of negotiating a price for the land, the army required MnDOT to build an addition to a newer office building nearby.

"Those were hard lessons," says Caroon. "We learned that the simple answer is not always the one that succeeds."

Adding to the project's political complexity, the Federal Transit Administration (FTA) demanded a key change early in the project's chronology: MnDOT could design the line and supervise construction, but the Metropolitan Council would hold the purse strings as the pass-through agency for federal dollars. Both sides had to sort out who would be the lead agency and what roles each would take. A third agency, the Metropolitan Airports Commission, supervised construction of the rail tunnels at the airport.

As the project sped towards groundbreaking, other issues surfaced. Xcel Energy filed a lawsuit over the costs of relocating its power lines in downtown Minneapolis, a lawsuit that could have added millions of dollars to the cost of the project. A federal judge later ruled against Xcel.

MnDOT also faced a legal challenge over the first company chosen to manage design and construction. That company's contract was eventually terminated, and a private partnership, Minnesota Transit Constructors (MnTC), was awarded the design-build contract in August 2000.

Four months later, on January 17, 2001, a crowd of more than 700 gathered for the project's chilly groundbreaking on the site of a future maintenance shop and yard near Franklin Avenue.

For Caroon, Barron, and others who had already put in hundreds of hours on the project, it was a watershed moment. They had hammered out an alignment and met key deadlines for state and federal money. The cost of the Hiawatha line was climbing it would eventually reach $715 million but so were local, state, and federal commitments to pay for the project.

Now the clock began running for a new group the private designers and construction crews who would transform preliminary designs into a working light-rail line. The accelerated timetable of a design-build project meant that construction could start on one segment while design work continued on another.

Hammering out details

Although the MnDOT team had completed enough of the design to put the project out for bid, hundreds of large and small details still had to be worked out. One of the engineers charged with that task was Michelle Boltjes (Civil '01), who found herself wrestling with curb cuts and street design for the light-rail line in downtown Minneapolis.

"We had some really tight constraints," says Boltjes, who worked on segments of the project for Professional Engineering Services as an undergraduate and later for Parsons Transportation Group, a MnTC partner. The streets had to drain away from the embedded track but had to be level so cars could drive over them "without going bumpety-bump," she says. "It would all work if you could sink the road down," she says. "But in downtown you can't really sink the roads because you have so many utilities, underground vaults, and parking garages underneath."

She also had to figure out how to get the train around corners within the tight constraints of downtown and where to dig holes for the overhead electrical lines without drilling into underground parking garages or utility lines.

When construction started on the project, public interest and input grew. Attendance at the regular project updates swelled. One of the most controversial issues was the design of a flyover bridge for Lake Street. As the project's cost grew, MnDOT engineers switched to a less expensive alternative, a structure that rested on a filled-earth berm. When nearby residents and business owners learned of the change, they complained that the berm would separate the light-rail line from the neighborhood. Public hearings led to a redesigned, open structure that added as much as $4.5 million to the project's cost.

Another key change, the location of the Mall of America station, was still unresolved as late as mid-2003. Crews had already finished laying several miles of rail when mall officials approved a rerouted line that would bring passengers directly to a transit center in the mall. That change added 0.4 miles to the light-rail line and $39.9 million to the cost.

"We had looked at 23 different options for how it could potentially tie in," Gladke says of the early designs. "We weren't really happy with the ultimate selection, but we had to move ahead with the plan. [Mall owners] never thought this project was going to become a reality. Once they saw where the station would end up across the street, they wanted to get it in the mall."

The Hiawatha Project Office was able to shift $30 million in federal dollars from another Metro Transit fund to help cover the cost and to include land donated by the mall in the $9.9 million balance.

'The train's coming'

In summer 2003, residents along the Hiawatha light-rail line saw a strange sight: three engineers clinging to a go-cart as it raced up and down the line. Kap Phanthavong (Civil '00), a project engineer for EVS Engineering who had logged considerable time on the line's electrical systems, was one of its passengers.

The go-cart attracted lots of attention. "People would yell, 'What is that thing?' I'd scream back, 'Due to budget cuts, this is the new LRT,'" Phanthavong says.

He and a crew rode the go-cart for a month, testing clearance for the trains up and down the line. The following March, he found himself on a real rail car literally. He spent three weeks riding on the top of the train, monitoring a camera that watched the sweep of the wires from the rail car to the overhead catenary poles that supply its electricity.

Andy Inserra, a civil engineering junior who sits on the Hiawatha LRT Community Advisory Committee, attended several public hearings held that spring. Residents living along the line packed meetings to discuss everything from exhaust at a bus terminal near 46th Street to the noise of train horns at night. (It turned out the culprit was a freight-rail operator.)

"We had all these subcommittees for studying the horns, neighbors beefing like crazy, people trying to get resolutions passed," says Inserra, an avid rail fan who is also president of the University's Railroad Club. "Someone finally called over to [the freight line's] shops and said, 'Have you guys been doing any of that?'"

Despite the gripes, enthusiasm for the project was growing.

"A lot of people are really excited about light rail, which helps," Inserra says. "They say, 'Sure we've got a backhoe sitting in our front yard, but it's going to be great because I can walk to the train station.'''

End of the line

On his weekly drive up and down the Hiawatha line in late April, Caroon sees light-rail trains shuttling back and forth as operators break in the new vehicles. He sees workers tweaking signals and putting the finishing touches on stations. On the line's final segment, in Bloomington, crews are still pouring concrete and laying rail.

After six years on the project, Caroon has a simple approach to dealing with surprises: Get people talking. When workers discovered Indian mounds along a segment of the line in Bloomington, he quickly had the state archaeologist and the contractor out on site "eyeball to eyeball," physically marking the space and discussing solutions.

As the project winds down, Caroon and his colleagues can point to some major victories: They have delivered the light-rail line on time and under budget.

"A lot of people said you couldn't build this project for less than $1 billion," Caroon says. "We're still under that."

Beyond the numbers is one final, tangible milestone a working light-rail line. Engineers involved in the project will see the trains running for decades to come, whisking passengers to and from the airport, the Mall of America, and downtown Minneapolis smoothly, quietly, and seamlessly.

"Every time I see that train run up and down Hiawatha, I can't get the grin off my face," Barron says.

FOR MORE INFORMATION see www.dot.state.mn.us/metro/lrt or www.metrotransit.org.