Salt Lake City Commuter Rail Constructors Utah's new commuter line will open early

Mass transit construction in Utah is ramping up, as a new 44-mile, $611-million commuter line between Salt Lake City and Pleasant View to the north is set to open in April, and construction of a 45-mile southern extension to Provo is to begin in January. The Utah Transit Authority is planning to build 70 more miles of transit in less than 10 years, says John Inglish, UTA general manager.

Salt Lake City Commuter Rail Constructors, a construction manager/general contractor joint venture of Stacy and Witbeck Inc., San Francisco, and Herzog Contracting Corp., St. Joseph, Mo., has the $194-million, 2.5-year contract to build the Front-runner north line. The April opening will be five months early, even with some $60 million in added scope of work, says Kevin McFall, the team's project director.

After voters passed a 1999 quarter-cent sales-tax increase to fund the line, UTA approached Union Pacific railroad and offered to buy 20 ft of land off its main line rather than asking to share its right-of-way, says John Inglish, UTA general manager. UTA bought 185 miles of right of way for $185 million. "It was more expensive but is paying off," he says.

S L C C Rail Constructors Spanning a freight yard

Despite working adjacent to active freight trains as well as highways, the team has logged 1.4 million man-hours with no lost-time injuries, says McFall. Accompanied by key local subs such as Ralph L. Wadsworth Construction Co. Inc. for bridge structures and a joint venture for signal systems, the CM/GC team worked with UTA and its designers, led by Parsons Corp., Pasadena, Calif., for more than a year before construction began.

But building a working relationship with Union Pacific was key to timely construction. The contractor provided safety training for all workers, including Union Pacific’s utility workers, in exchange for controlling right-of-way access. Eventually, the railroad allowed SLCCRC crews more and more stretches of access at a time, says McFall.

The authority also established an incentive wherein Union Pacific and the state Dept. of Transportation “grade” the contractor every quarter on how well it works with them. The contractor and UTA both contributed $1.5 million to a fund: Since the contractor’s score averaged 97%, it will get back its $1.5 million plus $1.5 million in a performance incentive from UTA, says McFall. A similar method involving businesses and residents worked well on UTA’s completed University line, whose route was placed in the middle of a commercial street.

Through value engineering, the team shaved $8 million off $30 million estimated to bridge an Ogden freight rail yard, says McFall. It cut about 1,000 ft off a planned 3,700-ft aerial structure by using 350,000 cu yd of fill, linked with precast concrete, steel I-beams and steel-plate girder spans.

The joint venture plans to begin work on the $450-million southern extension next year. Voters passed another referendum in 2006 approving another quarter-cent sales-tax increase. It will help fund more than $2 billion in commuter and light rail: the southern extension; a six-mile airport link; a four-mile line for Draper in the south; an 11-mile Jordan line in the southwest; and a five-mile line to the West Valley.