With parts of the line completed, why can’t Southwest Light Rail trains roll?

Eden Prairie resident Jasper Hanke hoped to ride the Southwest Light Rail extension, now dubbed the Metro Green Line Extension, to get to classes at the University of Minnesota. 

But Hanke, a senior environmental sciences student who expects to graduate this summer, likely won’t have the chance, at least for school.

“With the delay, I’m probably not gonna use it too much,” Hanke said as he waited for a ride home inside SouthWest Station in Eden Prairie, the final stop of the light rail line and a hub for SouthWest Transit buses.

When the Metropolitan Council first broke ground on the Hennepin County-planned project in 2018, the agency planned to open the line in 2023. Amid problems with building a tunnel in the Kenilworth corridor, the project’s opening day was delayed to 2027, with a final cost of $2.86 billion to be settled at a Dec. 11 Met Council meeting. 

The agency also faces scrutiny from the state Legislature regarding its finances and ability to rein in contractors, with a report expected to be finished this winter. And, the agency faces a federal lawsuit brought by one of their engineers. A trial is anticipated to begin next September. 

Despite the challenges, much of the line from Belt Line Boulevard in St. Louis Park west to SouthWest Station is mostly complete. The overhead wires are up, the fencing is in, and the signals are waiting to be tested. Most of the trains purchased for the extension are running today on the Blue Line. And Metro Transit Route 17 buses began serving the Blake Road light rail station on Dec. 7, primarily so their drivers can use a new restroom while on breaks. All that appears to remain are the installation of Go-To card readers and ticket vending machines, which were ordered in August. 

So why won’t Metro Transit, the agency that runs the region’s transit system under the Met Council, at least open the St. Louis Park to Eden Prairie segment to the riding public? It’s because there is no place along the line to maintain the trains.

“Light rail vehicles require access to the existing maintenance facilities in Minneapolis or St. Paul, as there is no maintenance facility being constructed as part of the Green Line Extension project,” spokesperson Drew Kerr said in an email. 

The agency initially reduced the size of the operations and maintenance facility to be built in Hopkins adjacent to the Shady Oak Road station as part of a 2015 cost-cutting move. In 2018, officials instead decided to expand the existing Blue Line maintenance facility in Minneapolis to handle the vehicles needed for the Metro Green Line Extension. The expansion was built in 2020. Part of the Hopkins site will now be home to a $14 million facility housing equipment to maintain the extension’s infrastructure. 

Metro Transit also can’t start testing on the line until it is completely built. “The entire alignment must complete – detailed testing, system integration and safety verifications – before revenue operations can commence,” Kerr added. 

If Metro Transit opened the completed Green Line Extension segment in and west of St. Louis Park, Ben Bradford would ride it to work at a restaurant in St. Louis Park. “I feel like the train would be a lot faster than the bus,” Bradford said as he rode the 612, a bus route paralleling the Green Line extension on Excelsior Boulevard. 

Other transit agencies in the nation building light rail projects have been able to open parts of their lines in spite of construction affecting a crucial segment. In Washington state, for example, Sound Transit is building a $4 billion, 18-mile light rail line called the East Link to connect downtown Seattle with the region’s eastern suburbs, home to Microsoft. 

Sound Transit delayed the opening of the entire East Link line from mid-2023 to 2025 after it directed its construction contractor to rebuild faulty track-supporting concrete plinths on a viaduct leading to the floating bridge crossing Puget Sound.

However, after pressure from local elected officials and tech executives, as well as studies by its staff, the Sound Transit board decided to open the completed segment in the eastern suburbs, dubbed the East Link Starter Line, earlier this year. What sets the East Link Starter Line apart from the completed Green Line extension segment is the East Link Starter Line is directly connected to an operations and maintenance facility along the line, which was built to support the extension. 

In Los Angeles, construction of a light-rail subway under downtown necessitated a two-plus-year split of the Metro L Line, which connected east Los Angeles and the San Gabriel Valley suburbs. One segment, running within East L.A., does not have a maintenance facility. The agency parked the trains operating on that segment in a tunnel or at Atlantic Station, the eastern end of the segment. Each month trains needing maintenance were trucked to a facility on the segment serving the San Gabriel Valley.

In the Twin Cities, Kerr said Metro Transit has more work to do to prepare for the line’s opening in 2027. Construction of the long-delayed Kenilworth tunnel is 95% complete, Kerr said, and workers have begun erecting overhead wires and installing communications systems. That work is expected to be finished in 2026. 

Crews are also wrapping up construction of the five Minneapolis stations, as well as the track between Target Field and Bryn Mawr station. They hope to begin installing signals, communications infrastructure, and overhead wires on that segment starting at the end of the year.

Vera Sachs is looking forward to the Metro Green Line Extension’s opening. She expects it to offer more frequent service between downtown Minneapolis and Eden Prairie than SouthWest Transit’s express buses do today.

“They’re just too infrequent and outdated,” Sachs said as she sat waiting, with another hour to go, for the next express bus to take her back to Minneapolis.

Editor’s note: H. Jiahong Pan wrote this story for MinnPost.com.

This article first appeared on MinnPost and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.

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