Reevely: Hoping for a windfall, Ottawa hurries to get Barrhaven rail underpass plans ‘shovel-ready’
The city is hurrying to get studies done for rail overpasses in Barrhaven, hoping to have plans to wave if upper-level governments show up with bags of money.
The rush comes after a 20-year delay on the projects, which local governments first investigated in the mid-1990s, and four years after a northbound OC Transpo bus on the Transitway adjacent to Woodroffe ran through a warning gate and hit a passing Via train, killing six people.
The city’s about to hire consultants for a fresh environmental assessment of overpasses for Woodroffe Avenue, the Transitway and Fallowfield Road, where each of those roadways crosses the railway tracks that cut southwest across Barrhaven.
The things will still be vastly more expensive than the city feared back when it dropped the notion back in the early 2000.
The problem then was that the ground around the rail crossings is both rocky and extremely wet, making it tough to build in. Water would run into construction trenches faster than it could be pumped out, workers would have to seal the rock with concrete as they went, and the underpasses the city had in mind would be in constant danger of leaks. Overpasses would be very nearly as difficult to construct, plus they’d anger nearby residents who wouldn’t want to see them or hear the racket of engines on the ascents.