Rogers Road bridge delayed yet again

One of the worst traffic bottlenecks in Wake Forest – if not the worst – is on Rogers Road at the two-lane CSX Railroad crossing.
This week Wake Forest’s Director of Engineering Joseph Guckavan confirmed the solution to the bottleneck, a four-lane vehicle bridge over the railroad tracks, has been delayed again, or again and again, from a letting date in October of this year to March of 2024. The letting date is the date when the bids for an advertised project are opened or when you can see who won the contract.
The bridge is not expected to be completed until late 2026 or early 2027. Guckavan has been with the town two years and says he has been told the bridge construction has been delayed for five years since it was first announced.
It is a project of the Rail Division of the North Carolina Department, and here is how news of the current delay was relayed to the town after Guckavan wrote two e-mail messages, on March 29 and again on April 4, requesting an update on the P-5707 (the bridge) project.
Brain E. Gackstetter, the senior project engineer in the Rail Division, wrote on April 4:
“Hey Joe,
Sorry about that. We were finalizing some details as it relates to the project and those have been cleared up. We are moving the letting to March 2024. This is due to processes with Raleigh Water and getting the appropriate agreements signed off. Due to the Departments change in construction method of bore and jack of the culvert pipe under Rogers Road, there is some minor design changes needed to the water and sewer plans. Because of Raleigh Water’s processes, we will not have the agreements in place before January.”
Mayor Vivian Jones said, “I was very disappointed when I learned that NCDOT has once again delayed letting the Rogers Road bridge project for construction until the spring of 2024. We were hoping to finally get started this fall.” Wake Forest had little input into the bridge design, but the town was able to upgrade some of the visual components, which the town will have to pay for, like the material for the bridge railings.
And we do not know just how traffic will be handled while the permanent bridge is built. It had seemed the plan was to build a temporary bridge first, next to the site of the permanent bridge. But a cheaper though perhaps not as safe solution is to continue with the two-lane signalized crossing next to the new bridge. When asked about that, Guckavan replied he has asked DOT and will get back to the Gazette as soon as they answer.
So what is the backstory to Rogers Road and the railroad crossing? It goes back to the 1990s when Andy Ammons was planning a subdivision on the hundreds or thousand acres of a dairy farm his father, Jud Ammons, bought from the Marshall and Stroud families at least a decade earlier. He then brought his sons out to the hilly property and, laboring along with them, planted untold numbers of pine seedlings over several years.
One of the problems Andy Ammons faced was that the road system – its spine – around the land was not what fit into his plan. At that time, Rogers Road to Rolesville deadended at Forestville Road about where Heritage Lake Road now begins, and Forestville Road deadended at South Main Street at a scrunched intersection next to Hoy Auction after a sharp bend and a hazardous railroad crossing.
So Ammons changed the roads. He purchased some land from the Holding family farm, which was now abandoned, and began to negotiate with the CSX Railroad to be able to run a new road across the tracks that would deadend at South Main Street south of Forestville.
Ammons said this week that the negotiating took three years. At the end, CSX got to close three crossings – Forestville, Juniper Avenue and another one he could not remember and neither could the editor – in return for Ammons opening one on the new extension of Rogers Road. Ammons has also donated land for the right-of-way when a four-lane crossing is possible.
CSX insisted the crossing be only two lanes although Ammons was building four-lane major roads in and around his new subdivision.
At that same time, CSX was agreeing to a six-lane crossing on Durant Road, Ammons said, and he pointed that out when he only wanted a four-lane crossing. Nix, nein and no.
The answer to the question of why a bottleneck on Rogers Road is the CSX Railroad, the friendly folks who closed crossings this spring without adequate information to all the drivers who use Wake Forest roads and just closed two this week. There was not time to get that information into the two weekly newspapers when CSX closed the Brick Street crossing on Monday and the Seawell Drive crossing on Wednesday for maintenance.
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