WESTBROOK - Huge road-rolling equipment swept back and forth across the future Shore Line East train station parking lot last week, compressing the surface in preparation for paving. Concrete curbing defining the traffic islands is already poured and new street lights installed. After many years of waiting, the $10 million train station construction project is now underway.

Construction on the Norris Avenue site began in November 2011 with site clean-up and building demolition work and continued this spring with site development and concrete work for the new, larger parking lot. The expanded lot will have 210 parking spaces rather than the 40 spaces the old lot provided. All construction work on the dual-platform station with pedestrian bridge and elevator is expected to be completed by the end of the summer of 2013.

The Westbrook train station project is the last of the planned train station upgrades that the state Department of Transportation (DOT) will complete for the Shore Line East commuter line.

Long planned, the station upgrade project was nearly cancelled for lack of a site large enough to accommodate the new Shore Line East station designs with higher platforms and larger parking lots. The only solution to keep the town's train station was to find a way to incorporate in the state's site plan the Norris Avenue town garage land. Thus was the concept of a land swap born in 2004: the town's 2½-acre Norris Avenue site for the state DOT's 5-acre Route 145 road maintenance site.

The town's leaders and the state DOT reached an agreement in principle on the terms of the land swap in the fall of 2005, but the town meeting didn't approve the deal until after the State Legislature in 2006 approved $1.5 million to pay to build a new town garage on the state's Route 145 site.

New Garage Bids Out Soon

According to Town Garage Committee Chair Tony Marino, by the end of last week, nearly 10 years of work on the land swap project had reached a key milestone: completion of plans and specifications for the bid package for a project to build a new town garage facility on the now-town-owned Route 145 site. As a pre-requisite to receiving state funding to pay for the work, DOT officials are now reviewing the bid package. Marino expects DOT will approve the package and allow the town to release a request for bids this week.

"As soon as the state DOT approves the bid package, we'll go out to bid," said Marino.

The new town garage will incorporate the existing bays of the state garage and add three more: two bays for vehicle maintenance work and one for vehicle washing. The plan also calls for the build-out of administrative offices for the town's public works department operations.

Uncertain of how far the state funding will stretch, the town's bid package will also ask bidders to provide prices for optional scopes including the cost to add a third maintenance bay and a storage building to house more department equipment.

Marino is optimistic that, if a request for bids is released this week as planned, construction on the new town facility will likely begin by late summer.