Iowa DOT presents new Merrill rail crossing designs during meeting
The Iowa Department of Transportation held a public meeting on Thursday concerning potentially removing and redesigning several rail crossings in Merrill. Three at-grade crossings are part of the proposal in Merrill: at US Highway 75, at Main Street, and at Calhoun Street.
Members of the DOT project team brought several proposed concepts for the crossing on Highway 75 to gather feedback from residents. The three preferred concepts the project team proposed includes: potentially shifting Highway 75 west and building a bridge over the tracks, or building a bridge over the tracks after the rail line is moved south, or shifting Highway 75 east and moving the rail line to the south.
The DOT says the study is seeking to identify ways to improve highway safety and traffic flow in the area, to mitigate a physical barrier posed by the rail corridor in the community, and to eliminate the risk of future highway-rail grade crossing accidents and incidents. The existing line can see up to 10 trains a day, causing traffic on Highway 75 to be backed up and creating safety issues.
More information on the study, as well as project materials that were made available at the meeting, can be found on the DOT’s website at iowadot.gov. Another meeting is planned for this summer, with the final study expected to be released this fall.
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What can be done with a National Landmark in Iowa called Blood Run?
Archaeologists, tribal representatives, educators and state officials gathered in northwest Iowa this week to discuss the future of a National Historic Landmark. Blood Run sits along the Big Sioux River and stretches from northwest Iowa into South Dakota. It’s where historians say the Oneota people first started settling over 1,100 years ago and lived, farmed and traded for centuries. It’s considered the ancestral home for the Omaha, Ponca, Oto and Ioway tribes. State Senator Jeff Taylor of Sioux Center says the site is important to the entire state.
Others at the event raised concerns about farming activity around burial mounds in the area, as well as preservation of the entire site, not just the 200 acres the State of Iowa acquired in 1987. Taylor says legislators have not seen a development or preservation plan for the area.
Taylor says that means any plan will require a combination of state funding and private donations. South Dakota opened Good Earth State Park in 2013 on its side of Blood Run. Two years ago, Iowans who are part of a group called Friends of Blood Run presented a nearly 10 million dollar preservation plan to the Iowa Natural Resource Commission. It included construction of an Oneota Archive and Research Center, with hopes it would become a national repository for Oneota artifacts. Archaeologists believe as many as six-thousand people once lived at Blood Run, but moved west in the 1700s.
(Story via Radio Iowa)
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