DETROIT, MI – M-1 Rail officials Thursday announced that 2015 will bring the most intense phase of work along Woodward Avenue in Detroit. It all starts Monday in Campus Martius park downtown.
Paul Childs, M-1’s chief operating officer, met with media Thursday morning to walk through what’s to come for Woodward’s 3.3-mile rail loop.
“(2015) is going to be a big year for us,” Childs said. “We (have) got a three-and-a-half mile construction area…the activity you saw last year was primarily us downtown, with a little bit of work north of I-75.”
Childs said construction will stretch, in phases, down Woodward from downtown Detroit all the way to M-1’s Penske Tech Center site at the other end of the line in the city’s New Center neighborhood.
The actual rail system will be built, but new lighting will be put in along the line and some of M-1’s 20 rail stations will be installed, too. While work in Midtown will not look much different to drivers, with two lanes (northbound and southbound) remaining the status quo, Sommer Woods, director of external relations, said the neighborhood will continue to handle construction as efficiently as possible.
“We’ve been able to work around construction last year,” she said, and the businesses in Midtown will continue to work around the orange barrels this year.
The work comes in increments, with M-1 sectioning off pieces of Woodward, excavating, companies laying utilities, then M-1 systems, then tracks and finally getting to the above ground work.