SLP Council: City Won't Support Relocating Freight Rail

The St. Louis Park city council appears to have come down strongly on the side of co-locating the city’s freight rail tracks with the Southwest Transitway.

At a work session Monday, council members fine-tuned the language of a letter it will send to the Met Council but finished their discussion united on the city’s two core conclusions:

• “Co-locating freight rail traffic is indeed viable.”

The letter, the final version of which will be sent to the Met Council in July, is the council’s clearest statement yet of its preferences for co-location. This draft comes the month after the Met Council angered many St. Louis Park residents by laying out a relocation option that would move freight rail tracks through the existing St. Louis Park High School football field.

The council’s discussion included talk of the relative importance of grade-separation for light-rail versus freight rail, the necessary width of the rightaway and how to prevent elevated train tracks from being an aesthetic blight.

Council member Anne Mavity was hesitant about univocally endorsing co-location even without grade-separation, saying that should light-rail run side-by-side with freight rail throughout St. Louis Park, traffic could radically worsen.

“I believe co-location can be viable, but I don’t think it’s viable unless we have a grade-separation for traffic to get through,” she said, specifically talking north-south traffic near the Wooddale Station. “A traffic proposal must be in here.”

Other council members were supportive of grade-separation but didn’t see it as a deal breaker.