Six months ago, Harrisburg Boulevard looked almost exactly as it has for more than five years, dotted by construction equipment. East of downtown Houston, the thoroughfare was more exposed dirt than street, and showed little sign of the rail overpass transit officials promised eastside residents.
With no span in sight, residents – not to mention many Metro officials – were over it. For months, board members had called the overpass “a nightmare” and “the project that won’t die.”
“We had nothing,” said Glenn Peters, who Metropolitan Transit Authority brought in about that time to get the project literally off the ground. “Now look at it.”
Months late and many frustrating meetings later, crews have made significant progress on a rail and automobile overpass critical to finishing Metro’s Green Line along Harrisburg spanning a set of Union Pacific Railroad tracks. Cars can choose between crossing the freight tracks at grade on a new roadway, or using the overpass.
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Though much work remains on the $31 million project, completion gets closer with every milestone reached. Provided crews hold to current schedules, Metro could begin testing trains and the track in October and start carrying passengers to the Magnolia Park Transit Center by late December or early January. If the line is ready for passengers, it would be in time for Super Bowl LI, which officials said was a priority.
For now, transit officials are just basking in how far they’ve come.
“It was a wonderful sight to stand out and watch the first cars go over that bridge,” said Peters, who Metro brought in as a consultant to coordinate the project.
Peters, a veteran of construction projects dating to his days as a soldier building a bridge in Vietnam, has extensive local construction experience, overseeing projects at the county and state level.
See here for the last update. Getting everything finished in time for the Super Bowl is the main goal at this point, and all signs point to it getting done. I figure there will be some champagne flowing at the Lee Brown building once this is all done.