This week Norfolk & Southern will issue a bulletin to their engineers signaling the establishment of the quiet zone. At 12:01 AM on New Year’s Eve it will finally become official, as the Twinsburg Road crossing becomes a quiet zone. On December 10th, Mayor Don Kuchta started the clock ticking on the 21 day waiting period when he filed the paperwork with the PUCO, FRA, ORDC and Norfolk & Southern Railroad to officially establish the quiet zone.
All work necessary to qualify the Twinsburg Road crossing for a quiet zone was finished by early November, but the final cost will not be known until sometime early next year. We were awarded $168,323 in stimulus funds for the project, $136,253 of which was earmarked for Norfolk & Southern crossing circuitry upgrades. Norfolk & Southern budgeted 19 work days for the project, but completed their work in approximately 10 days. We budgeted $32,070 for the median dividers, engineering and miscellaneous other work Macedonia was responsible to complete. The total cost associated with Macedonia’s portion of the project was approximately $24,000. The projected final cost of the quiet zone project should come in between $146,500 - $150,000.
I would like to thank all those who have worked together to make this possible. Within 3 years we completed a project we thought couldn’t be done with 3 times the budget. Happy New Year!
