Project near 12-Mile Village to include frontage road to connect Keeney Road and Old Richardson Highway
Construction of the new Richardson Highway railroad-crossing overpass just east of Fairbanks is nearing completion. And work on a second railroad overpass project on the highway near North Pole is already well under way.
The new overpass at milepost 359 just east of Fairbanks will be completed by the end of October. By then, the state Department of Transportation hopes to be finishing up this year’s preliminary work around the newer overpass that’ll be built around 12-Mile Village, just west of North Pole.
“We’re really preparing for that work,” said Danielle Tessen, a Transportation Department spokesperson. “And so you’ll see activities on the side, and you’ll see us working around the area.”
Tessen said Tuesday work on the newer overpass project began in early June and is now well under way around the railroad crossing at milepost 351, near 12-mile Village.
“There’s been some clearing on the north end, just to clean up around the fence line,” she said, “and then on the south side, there’s some areas that’ve been cleared for us to install that new frontage road.”
That’s the frontage road that workers will build to connect Keeney Road and a stretch of the Old Richardson Highway that intersects with the new Richardson Highway at milepost 351. “And in that area is where we’re really where going to be seeing a lot more activity,” Tessen said.
DOT is building the frontage road and the newer overpass to replace the existing intersection and improve safety along that stretch of the highway, where car crashes occur at a rate 2-and-a-half times greater than the statewide average for that kind of intersection. That’s why both overpasses are being built with funding from the federal Highway Safety Improvement Program.
The newer overpass also will ease traffic congestion.
“Really just looking at improving traffic flow at the intersection of Richardson Highway milepost 351,” she said.
That means all the construction activity motorists been dealing with around the nearly completed overpass project at milepost 359 will move from there next year to the newer overpass project. “Similar to what we’ve seen this year is what we can anticipate to see in 2025, at 351.”
Tessen says the project will shut down for the year at the end of October. And next spring, HC Contractors, the company running the $25 million project, will get back to work on the newer overpass project. She says DOT and the contractor are already accumulating materials like light poles and culverts so they can avoid delays caused by long, slow supply chains.
“We’re seeing across the state that that is a challenge,” she said, “and so with this project, we’re working with that contractor to really stockpile some of those materials.”
The newer railroad overpass crossing is scheduled to be completed by the end of October 2025.
