Rails start to go down on extension

PALMER — All along, when the Mat-Su Borough talked about the rail extension to Point MacKenzie, it was always said that the last step in the process was putting rails atop the cleared path.

But the borough has since tweaked that a bit and is installing rails for a siding where the rail extension will link to the main line in Houston.

“We are actually laying ties and rail on that segment because we are going to use segment six as storage area for ballast and ties and rails,” Joe Perkins, who the borough has put in charge of overseeing the rail project, told the borough assembly at its meeting Feb. 18. “We want to be able to back trains into that segment and unload them.”

Describing railroad workers as “pretty hardy folks,” he said that work is going on right now, despite the fact that most construction in Alaska ceases in the winter. Borough Mayor Larry DeVilbiss trumpeted this development in his latest Mayor’s Minute podcast, saying he found the news that rails were going in “exciting.”

“I love to see things like that happening,” he said.

For clearing and leveling the path from Point MacKenzie to Houston the project was divided into six segments, a number of which are already underway — some of them 80 percent or more complete, some just 5 percent. For the second phase — putting rails on the path — the route was divided into two segments.

Overall, Perkins said, “we’ve got well over 2/3 of it funded and under construction.”

The project includes six bridges and crosses enough trails that a $600,000 contract was awarded for just to work on trails, Perkins said.

“We’ve moved something like 6 million cubic yards of material already on this project,” Perkins said.

He said that last summer the borough employed 200 people, most of them heavy equipment operators. The borough intends to employ that many for most of this summer, too.

“We, in fact, took most of the operators out of the entire state and a lot of the contractors were complaining because we had hired most of the operators,” he said.

Borough Manager John Moosey said that the prospect of having access to rail is what attracted at least one current tenant of Port MacKenzie — SouthCentral Energy, which built a tank farm there — and has attracted one more.

He said more companies have said they’d ship on the rail, but signing people up can be difficult without a firm completion date.

“The challenge we have on actually signing people up is we don’t know if the rail is going to be ready in 2016 or 2018,” Moosey said.

That’s because finishing the project is wholly dependant on funding. And while the borough has received $141 million in state grants and $30 million in money the state borrowed, it still needs $101.5 million more to finish the work.

The borough has asked for $60 million in the next state budget, which is under discussion in Juneau now. The budget that Gov. Sean Parnell initially proposed, and which the Legislature uses as kind of a starting point, contained just $5 million for the project.

“Completion date is totally, totally dependant on how much money we get,” Perkins said.

Contact Andrew Wellner at 352-2270

or andrew.wellner@frontiersman.com.