Railroad repairs nearly complete

DES MOINES (AP) — More than a year after record flooding wiped out 17 railroad bridges and hundreds of miles of track in Iowa, officials say repairs are almost done.

Gov. Chet Culver and U.S. Rep. Bruce Braley, D-Iowa, attended a ceremony Monday to announce the reopening of the Iowa Northern Railway Bridge in Waterloo, a nearly $6 million project to restore rail service over the Cedar River. The final tracks for the bridge will be put in place in October.

Spokesmen for the Union Pacific and BNSF railroads said repairs to their companies’ tracks have been complete for a while, but that isn’t the case for some smaller railroads.

Damage to Iowa’s railroad tracks and bridges was estimated as high as $80 million, according to the Iowa Department of Transportation. Repairs to the state’s railroad tracks and bridges were paid for through a combination of state and federal dollars.

Jeff Giertz, a spokesman for Braley, said rerouting rail traffic around the washed-out Waterloo bridge cost a total of about $500,000 a month.

James Broghammer, president of the Iowa River Railroad, which operates tracks from Ackley to Marshalltown in central Iowa, said his company had seven bridges washed away in the spring 2008 floods. The bridges were repaired and finally back in operation 45 days ago, Broghammer said.

He said traffic had to be rerouted 200 miles out of the way, delaying shipments of agricultural and manufacturing products by as much as four or five days for some customers. He declined to give the costs associated with train rerouting and shipment delays.

“Our customers were paying the freight to reroute those trains to the north,” he said. “We only brought them in the last 20 miles.”

Tammy Nicholson, a spokeswoman for the Iowa Department of Transportation’s office of rail transportation, said the agency keeps records of bridges and railroad tracks damaged by flooding but does not track progress on flood repairs.

“On some of the smaller ones, on our short-line railroads that were washed out, there is less data and tracking on those,” she said.

Another major railroad bridge that has been rebuilt after being damaged by last year’s flooding is the Cedar Rapids and Iowa City Railway Co. bridge in Cedar Rapids.

Giertz said the cost of rebuilding that bridge was nearly $9 million.

The Iowa Northern Railway bridge’s repairs employed state-of-the-art flood mitigation construction techniques to limit the effects of future high water.

Said Culver, “We’ll keep working to expand freight rail, passenger rail and build up a modern 21st-century transportation system, while creating jobs and rebuilding Iowa’s infrastructure.”

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