Mary Spicuzza

Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

After months of planning, construction of the Milwaukee Streetcar is on track to begin in April.

Route construction — the laying of rails on city streets — will begin on W. St. Paul Ave. in early April, officials said Friday during a streetcar committee meeting at City Hall. Rail installation will start west of the Milwaukee River on St. Paul, then move to Broadway, and continue along the planned route throughout 2017 and into 2018.

"It will be very similar to street construction," said Mike Ethier of Kiewit Infrastructure, the project's general contractor. "If you didn't know it was a streetcar, you'd think it was just some kind of road construction job going on until the rails appear."

He added that once workers are actually building the track, it will look "like the road is being reconstructed, or just a piece of it is being reconstructed in the middle." To install the rail, workers will dig trenches, lay the rail, pour concrete around it, and use asphalt to match the existing roadway.

Route construction will be planned around events like Summerfest, he said.

Steel rails for the project will be delivered next month to "key points throughout the city," Ethier said. Nearly 500 eighty-foot-long "sticks" of rail will be sent to five locations along the route, where they will be welded into sections of up to 320 feet in length before being installed.

Hiring for the project is expected to begin soon.

Streets directly affected by the track construction include sections of W. St. Paul Ave., 4th St., Broadway, Jackson St., Ogden Ave., Milwaukee St. and Kilbourn Ave.

After the track is laid, poles holding cables to power the streetcar will be installed.

Officials are trying to avoid completely closing off streets, but will do so in some cases — such as St. Paul — where the street is too narrow to safely leave part of it open, Ethier said. That closure will last four to six weeks, he said.

Construction will also likely be put on hold for at least a month next winter, Ethier said.

"Winter is a challenge," he said. "Right now, the middle of winter — 2017 into 2018 — we tentatively will shut down for a month or two. Similar to a road job in the dead of winter where ideally you don't work."

City officials have been meeting with neighboring businesses and residents to notify them about construction plans, said Ghassan Korban, commissioner of the Department of Public Works.

"I would be surprised if anybody who lives on the route is surprised about this project," Korban said. "We've been talking about it for months, and we've been reaching out one-on-one. If anybody wants to sit down with us, we're ready."

Also on Friday, city officials announced a request for proposals seeking an operator for the streetcar system.

The first streetcar, which is being built by Brookville Equipment Corp., is scheduled to arrive in Milwaukee in December. That contract calls for Brookville to initially build four cars, but the company may be tapped to make a fifth vehicle for the lakefront line in the near future. City officials say the company could eventually manufacture as many as 24 vehicles for Milwaukee.

City officials visited the company this month.

Service for the initial downtown route is expected to begin in fall 2018, and the lakefront line is expected to start operating in 2019.

The streetcar plan aims to connect the Milwaukee Intermodal Station with the city's lower east side. The project's capital budget is about $128 million for a 2.5-mile route, with an estimated $3.2 million annual operating and maintenance budget.