After endless digging and more digging, construction crews at downtown Silver Spring’s transit center site will begin blasting at bedrock later this month, county reps announced.
Expect the walls to shake, the earth to quake, and perhaps your mind to ache on or after Saturday, Dec 19, Don Scheuerman, with the department of general services, said at last Tuesday’s pedestrian safety committee in downtown Silver Spring.
Daily blasting will go down at 2:00 p.m., during which car and people traffic will be stopped along Colesville Road and Ramsey Avenue. Scheuerman did not say how long the street and sidewalk would be off limits, but a daily blast job in South Silver Spring last year was a 15-minute (or less) routine, as recorded in a YouTube video.
Once the blasting work is completed, crews can begin to lay down the three-tiered transit center’s foundation, David Dise, director of the general services department, told the pedestrian safety committee. That action should start next spring, and by summer 2010, the transit center’s skeletal structure should be apparent, he said.
The transit center eventually will house local and regional bus stops, with connections to the Metro’s Red Line, MARC rail and possibly the Purple Line light-rail system. Dise predicted a spring 2011 opening.
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Add Amtrak to the transit center.
Editor’s note: This comment has not been verified. — JD (Dec 9, 2009)
As noted on the “Just Up The Pike” blog recently (12/2), the most amazing thing about this whole transit centre thingy is that despite the fact that blasting is commencing and construction in some form or another has been under way for what seems like years, we still don’t have a good idea of what the final project will look like. All the images that I’ve seen still show somewhat amorphous, generic looking structures that appear to dwarf everything around them. Even the heart of the transit centre doesn’t appear too defined. The link on the SilverSpringDowntown.com website for the center says “click here” to see what it will look like, but all that does is take you to MCDOT’s site which has no images of the transit center.
You’d think that someone in that giant hole knows what it is their constructing.
“When completed, the downtown Silver Spring Transit facility will bring together bus (Metrobus, Ride-On, MTA Commuter, Van-Go, inter-city bus lines and the Un. of MD shuttle), rail (Metrorail, Amtrak, and MARC) and automobile traffic (taxi and kiss-and-ride).”
Silver Spring Transit Center Aided by Transit Grant
The Washington Post
Montgomery Extra section p. 18
June 25, 2009
Editor’s note: Thanks, Jerry. I knew there was a reason to still read The Post. — JD (Dec 9, 2009)
Only problem with Amtrak there is that Amtrak’s one train a day (the Capitol Limited to/from Chicago) currently doesn’t stop in Silver Spring and a stop so close to DC might be redundant.
It would be nice and it’d have come in handy when I took the Capitol Limited last May and had to backtrack that 7 miles from Union Station to DTSS, but how many people would it truly benefit?
I thught Greyhound/Petter Pan was to move there too.