2021 Update #30

Major Construction Comes to an End

The Highlights

• Downtown construction marks major milestone

• Hutchins to pave town highways next week

• Printer’s Alley reopens

• Continued progress on the Amtrak rail platform

On Friday, June 2, 2017, construction of the Middlebury Bridge & Rail Project got underway with the drilling of a test pit at the Main Street entrance to Printer’s Alley to locate the Town’s water and sewer force main lines underneath the roadway.

The following Tuesday, as shown below in our first photo of the week, Kubricky subcontractor Nicholson began drilling minipiles on Main Street.

Some six weeks later, the 100-year-old and heavily deteriorated Main Street Bridge was demolished, to be replaced with a temporary span, and the rebuilding of central downtown began in earnest.

Fast forward to today and on Friday, September 10—some 1,561 days and 223 weeks later—major construction—and the disruption that accompanied it—will come to an end downtown.

As we discussed last week, Friday’s milestone represents the project’s Substantial Completion, the date on which the VTrans Resident Engineer determines that all contract work except for “punch list” items—minor repairs and corrections—has been completed.

Project Acceptance will follow a little later this Fall when those minor repairs and corrections are completed.

Our second photo of the week shows the same view as above more than four years of construction later. While the dreary sky may remain the same, so much else has changed.

Your Weekly Construction Update

Before we get into our weekly update of construction downtown, I wanted to let you know that J. Hutchins is expected to do the final paving of our downtown highways next week. I know we’ll all be glad when that job is finally done.

As we go to press Thursday evening, L&D will try again to complete the striping of parking spaces and roadway markings on Main Street and Merchants Row. Last week’s effort had to be cut short as rain once again swept into town.

On Friday, Printer’s Alley, closed to motorists since Summer 2017, will reopen to traffic entering the Marble Works from Main Street.

As a reminder, this is a narrow, one-way roadway and you won’t be able to enter Main Street from Printer’s Alley. But neither will you have to worry about navigating around pedestrians, who now have two new sidewalks connecting Main Street and the Marble Works.

The Triangle Park fountain will probably not become fully operational until sometime next week. Waters needs to finish installing a rubber membrane to waterproof the fountain (you may have noticed it leaking when we turned it on for the Lazarus Park dedication ceremony) and the fountain’s pump needs some electrical work.

From central downtown, let’s jump up to the Amtrak rail platform, which this week again saw extensive activity. The rail platform project is separate from our downtown construction project and will continue to the end of the month.

All structural steel, including metal hand railings, has now been installed. The standing seam metal roof—it’s the traditional flat green in color—has been delivered and will be installed next week on top of the metal decking now in place.

As shown in our next photo, Lafayette has spent the week installing steel railing fence to set off the rail platform area. That fence will extend from the Elm Street overpass to the end of the U-walls on the north end of the project.

As the week draws to a close, the Lafayette crew is also finishing installation of the steel railing fence on the Seymour Street side of the rail line, as shown in our next photo.

And finally, on the south end of the project, as shown in our final photo of the week, Kubricky has been removing the access road between Cross Street Bridge and Water Street and in its place constructing a utility access road for the Town’s new sewer line and building a drainage swale to keep water off the tracks.

That work will wrap up early next week and then our friends on Water Street will join the rest of downtown in marking the end of a long run of construction.

That’s all for today. See you downtown.

Please keep your comments and questions coming. Send me an email at jgish@townofmiddlebury.org and I’ll try to cover it in my next update.