Motorists advised of railroad crossing approach repairs near Clear Lake High School on Wednesday

CLEAR LAKE — Motorists around the Clear Lake High School area will need to be aware of a railroad crossing repair project taking place on Wednesday.

City Engineer Matt Steding says the city will be working on the approaches to the rail crossing on North 20th Street just south of 7th Avenue North. He says they were planning to do it on Friday when there’s no school, but Heartland Asphalt is needing to move things ahead due to the forecast of colder temperatures moving in this weekend.

Steding says while it’s not a total solution to the problem of the rough crossing, it will make some improvement.  “It’s not ideal timing wise, but we’re going to get in there and we’re going re-do these approaches to the railroad crossing, and it should be a lot, lot smoother transition going across there. It’s not going to be a 100% fix because the crossing itself is in much need of repair, but it’s going to be a lot smoother transition going across there in the interim until we can get this all sorted out with the funding.”

Steding says he has filed an application with the Iowa Department of Transportation’s Grade Crossing Surface Repair Fund, but there is such a long wait list for funding, they wanted to do something now with the crossing approaches. “I put one out on 20th Street because that crossing was getting pretty severely bad. What happened was, you get put on a wait list due to the severity of the crossing, and that wait list is roughly four years long. So it stretches out there quite a ways.”

Steding says a meeting with Iowa DOT officials is scheduled for the near future in an attempt to get this crossing project pushed up on the calendar.