Star Tribune
The latest SWLRT snafu: wrong placement of tracks
On a hunch, Marion Collins took a giant tape measure last December and calculated the distance between light rail and freight rail tracks installed near her Minneapolis home for the Southwest light rail line. Her hunch proved correct — and it turned into the latest snafu dogging construction of the $2.9 billion transit project.
Collins knew the distance between the center of one set of tracks to the middle of the other was designed to be 25 feet to separate light-rail and freight trains along a narrow stretch of the route. But her measurement found the distance was nearly 11 inches short of the mark.
That means the 200 light-rail trains traveling through the Kenilworth corridor every day will be nearly a foot closer to nearby freight trains, which often carry hazardous materials such as ethanol. The project, about 80% complete, is slated to begin service in 2027.
“When there’s a collision, our neighborhood will become a big black hole,” Collins said in a recent interview. Other neighbors, donning tape measures and a healthy sense of skepticism, came up with similar measurements as well.
In an interview with the Star Tribune, Southwest Project Director Jim Alexander said, “we have to figure out what happened and see what we can do about it.” He told members of the Metropolitan Council last month, after KSTP first reported the problem, that the fix could happen later this spring or early summer and it won’t affect the project’s overall price tag.
Alexander said his staff took their own measurements near the W. 21st St. station and found the tracks are seven inches short of 25 feet. Either way, the tracks were installed too close to one another.
The co-location of light-rail and freight trains in the narrow corridor of Minneapolis has long been a challenge for the 14.5-mile extension of the Green Line, which will link downtown Minneapolis with Eden Prairie. An early design of the route called for freight trains, operated by Twin Cities & Western Railroad (TC&W), to be routed through St. Louis Park, leaving the Kenilworth Corridor with just light rail trains, and a bike and pedestrian path.
But St. Louis Park residents fended off the proposed alignment a decade ago, leaving transit planners to figure out how to squeeze freight, light rail and the bike and pedestrian path in Minneapolis. This led to a tunnel being added on part of the route for light-rail trains, a complex option that caused the project’s budget to more than double since 2011, making it the most-expensive public works project in Minnesota history.
Alexander said about 100 feet of track, which was installed around a year ago, is affected. The segment of the project in Minneapolis, he added, hasn’t been formally turned over by the contractor to the Met Council, which is overseeing Southwest’s construction. When that happens, then the project’s engineers check to see if it was built to specification.
“We’re talking to our engineer to see what happened to see what we can do about it,” Alexander said. “I don’t consider this a big issue, but we have to take a look at it and see what we can do to fix it.”
The project’s general contractor, Lunda/C.S. McCrossan Joint Venture (LMJV), declined to comment on the track issue.
The Southwest project is currently being probed by the state’s Office of the Legislative Auditor in an attempt to figure out what went wrong with its ballooning budget and timeline. One of the reports issued by the auditor last year took the Met Council to task failing to enforce the $799 million construction contract, but LMJV later criticized the state auditor for lacking the necessary expertise to review such a complicated project.
The Federal Transit Administration, which regulates light rail and is paying nearly $1 billion to build Southwest, referred questions to the Federal Railroad Administration. A spokesman for the FRA said there is no “specific guidance” on track spacing, crash walls or barriers in this kind of scenario.
Alexander said anything less than 25 feet between freight and light rail tracks would require a crash wall, according to the project’s design. The project’s design calls for several crash walls, including one just west of Target Field that was built at the behest of rail giant BNSF Railway to separate its trains from Southwest’s. The mile-long wall cost $93 million.
Mark Wegner, CEO of TC&W Railroad, said the discovery about the track spacing “isn’t a concern, they can rectify it.” If tracks were closer than 25 feet, it would make it more difficult and expensive for maintenance workers to do their job safely, he said.
“I would characterize this as a potential annoyance,” Wegner said. “It’s not a safety concern.”
Alexander said the current design calls for “intrusion protection” — bolsters separating freight and light-rail trains along this segment that send a signal to a rail control center and alerting train operators if there’s a problem.
Even at 25 feet, Collins says it’s too close for comfort. “I really don’t feel they’re invested in safety,” she said of the Met Council.
The Southwest project has been controversial in Minneapolis for more than a decade, and in 2014, neighbors sued to stop the line from being built, saying it violated federal environmental laws. The suit was unsuccessful, but bitter feelings continue to fester.
Not far from the track blunder, residents of the Cedar Isles Condominiums are locked in mediation with the Met Council over cracks in the building and flooding in its parking garage that occurred during construction of the nearby Kenilworth tunnel.
When asked why it took residents donning a measuring tape to discover the latest problem, Alexander said “I know this has caused another ripple with the neighbors, but we still feel very highly about this project, it will be a transformational line for the region.”
Collins says she’s glad she acted on her hunch: “I don’t trust them, that’s why I measured.”
Star Tribune
Trump wanted generals like Hitler’s and said Nazi leader ‘did some good things,’ John Kelly claims
WASHINGTON — Donald Trump’s longest-serving chief of staff is warning that the Republican presidential nominee meets the definition of a fascist and that while in office, Trump suggested that Nazi leader Adolf Hitler ”did some good things.”
The comments from John Kelly, the retired Marine general who worked for Trump in the White House from 2017 to 2019, came in interviews with both The New York Times and The Atlantic. They build on a a growing series of warnings from former top Trump officials as the election enters its final weeks.
Kelly has long been critical of Trump and previously accused him of calling veterans killed in combat ”suckers” and ”losers.” Still, his new warnings came just two weeks before Election Day, as Trump seeks a second term vowing to dramatically expand his use of the military at home and suggesting he would use force to go after Americans he considers ”enemies from within.”
”He commented more than once that, ‘You know, Hitler did some good things, too,”’ Kelly recalled to The Times. Kelly said he would usually quash the conversation by saying ”nothing (Hitler) did, you could argue, was good,” but that Trump would occasionally bring up the topic again.
In his interview with The Atlantic, Kelly recalled that when Trump raised the idea of needing ”German generals,” Kelly would ask if he meant ”Bismarck’s generals,” referring to Otto von Bismarck, the former chancellor of the German Reich who oversaw the unification of Germany. ”Surely you can’t mean Hitler’s generals,” Kelly recalled asking Trump. To which the former president responded, ”Yeah, yeah, Hitler’s generals.”
Trump’s campaign denied these stories on Tuesday, with Steven Cheung, a Trump campaign spokesman, arguing Kelly has ”beclowned himself with these debunked stories he has fabricated.”
Polls show the race is tight in a string of swing states, and both Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris are crisscrossing the country making their final pitches to the sliver of undecided voters.
Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, Harris’ running mate who served 24 years in various units and jobs in the Army National Guard, quickly used the interviews to assail Trump on Tuesday night.
Star Tribune
Officials await word on whose remains were found in camper that burned in Aitkin County
Officials are awaiting word on whose remains were found in a camper that burned overnight this week in northern Minnesota.
The Aitkin County Sheriff’s Office said it was alerted about 8:15 a.m. Monday by a caller about the camper having caught fire roughly 10 miles north of McGregor at a residence in Shamrock Township.
Law enforcement showed up and found the remains inside, the sheriff’s office said. They have since been sent to the Ramsey County Medical Examiner’s Office for identification.
The State Fire Marshal is heading the investigation into what led to the fire.
You hear a lot of women saying they’d rather be alone in the woods with a bear, not a man, because they considered the man to be more dangerous.
I always chose the man, because my interactions with men have generally been positive, and a man wandering through the woods seemed likely to be a hunter or a naturalist or just someone out enjoying nature. Someone reasonable. Someone more likely to harbor a save-the-maiden fantasy than a desire to harm. Bears, on the other hand, if they have it in their head to attack, there is little you could do but try to survive.
A recent visit to Ely’s North American Bear Center changed my mind. Not that I think less of men, but that I think more of bears. Black bears, at least.
The Bear Center provides refuge to three black bears, at least one of whom would have been otherwise euthanized. There’s Lucky, abandoned or orphaned as a cub, who was begging for food near Madison, Wis., and who came within an hour of being put down before a rescuer whisked him off to Ely. There’s Tasha, fat, sleek, and gorgeous, discovered in 2015 in Kentucky trying to nurse on her dead mother, who was believed to have been hit by a vehicle. And Holly, separated from her mother during an Arkansas fire, and who had slipped off to hibernate before our visit.
The bears were fascinating, delicately lipping up cranberries and shelling out nuts with their back teeth during our visit. We learned that their sense of smell is seven times stronger than that of a bloodhound, and that they can smell through an organ on the roof of their mouths.
In fact, sometimes they’ll stand erect and open their mouths – which looks threatening, but it’s really just to get a better sense of their surroundings, said Spencer Peter, assistant director and biologist at the center.
Hollywood trains them to stand like that for movies, he said. “But they’ll dub in the sound.”
