Quote:
Originally Posted by Randomguy34
^ Looking at ardecila's diagram and the DPI's renderings, it looks like the SCAL is still going to have a weird bend in it's route. I'm surprised that the city didn't ask for DPI to be shifted a bit north. With the SCAL reconstruction, this would have been a great opportunity to straighten the tracks
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The river bridge isn't aligned with the SCAL east of Clark, so there has to be a bend of some kind, it'll never be perfectly straight.
The SCAL bridge over Clark still needs replaced and the plan is to straighten it out when they do that. However, this means realigning about 600' of track west of Clark St on both the SCAL and CN's Freeport Sub. They actually made the new bridge deck over the Freeport Sub extra wide so that the Freeport Sub track can be re-aligned in the future, and the abutment walls were made extra wide so that the bridge deck can be slid laterally a few feet as well.
The problem here at 16th Jct is so many interested parties (CN, Metra, Related, and Amtrak) and hammering out a deal for who does what work in what order has been tricky. If Amtrak gets their big federal grant, then the assumption is that they will pay for everything.
The DPI location does mean that the B&OCT bridge (the permanently up one) can never be re-used, at least for rail. A ped-bike rehab would be nice for that bridge, but I'm not sure anybody wants a convenient walking path to Pacific Garden Mission.