Mundane March

The heading on my blog mentions the word, mundane, and indeed the past few days have been mundane. We continue to be covered with snow and just can't get the temperature above freezing to melt it. I've kept my nose glued to the computer reading students' papers and being disappointed at the quality of some of them. The least of this disappointment is that if the poor papers are re-written I have to read them again.

Here are some snow visions:

This is a snow bank outside my building, made bigger by pushing snow up from the street.

Here's another one -- a bit more scenic:

I also found this view while walking around:

In the midst of the mundane and blah, we got hit with a detour. Obviously trains used to come into the Union Depot or it wouldn't be called that. Then in the 1970s when everything had to be made more modern, the idea came to build a small new building about the borderline of St. Paul and Minneapolis and that is where the Amtrack has stopped since then. This is one of those non-descript 1970s could be anything buildings, and located in an area of small office buildings, quite out of the way of anything interesting. I much prefer the grand old train stations I've found in Central Europe even if some are in poor repair. One knows it is a train station.

Now the plan is to refurbish the Union Depot back into a transit hub. The light rail will end there, bus routes will start and end there, other passenger rail lines will come into this space. This means building the rail line back into the depot.

Readers know that I live along the river and that most of Saint Paul is up on a bluff. There are two ways to get there. On Eagle Street one must cross the train tracks, on Sibley Street one goes under the train tracks -- much preferable because auto traffic and car traffic can move at the same time. Sibley Street, however, closed on March 1 and the only way to get up into the city is now Eagle Street, across the train tracks. Closure of Sibley allows the spur line to be built to move the trains again into Union Depot.

Here's a view out my window of rush hour when a train is moving:

The line of stopped traffic went back at least a mile. It takes awhile to clear as well, for only 3-4 cars can move on the left turn light to go up the hill into the downtown area. This is made a bit more difficult right now, because we are in the midst of March Madness. March Madness is the high school tournament season when every weekend during March there is some type of high school state athletic event. This brings extra traffic right into this area, and lot of that traffic are people who don't know the area very well.

Work began immediately the day of the closure. I can see some of the work on the downward drive to the river, for I can still use the parallel street to Sibley to come home. There is huge construction equipment in the area already doing demolition. Some day when the weather is more favorable, I'll take a long walk and do some photos. 

This detour goes until at least August 1. With all my summer travel plans I will miss a lot of this! And we probably would have lost that area too during April when the floods hit. That area is a bit lower than where I live and so is always closed and sand bagged so that river water can not run up the hill and flood the downtown area.

The question about floods now is not whether it will happen, but rather how far up on the all time high floods this one will go.