Depot site continued to be a busy construction place, all through the winter

by Dan McClelland

The millions of dollars in construction work to the New York State Department of Transportation’s amenities around the Tupper Lake train station have continued all winter long.

The ambitious track project at the station in the Junction was started in the summer of 2023, when the contract was let by the railroad division of the state DOT to a major North Country construction firm, Bette & Cring.

The majority of the winter work went on inside the plastic, temporary enclosures of the two large canopies over the platforms where passengers will wait to board and get off the Adirondack Railroad Preservation Society trains each summer and fall.

Temporary frameworks over each, enclosed in plastic, were completed before winter to give workmen a warm place to finish the covered areas above the platforms built last summer.

Each shelter area, the most easterly of which is over 100 feet long and adjoins the village’s downtown baseball field, was completely roofed over the winter by roofers of Crate and Reuben in a near-indoor conditions.

Bette & Cring retained the roofing company to do much of the work inside each shelter. It also paid the company to install in recent weeks new metal rain gutters, painted brown on the trackside of the station, to funnel roof water into the new drainage system the general contractor installed along the tracks last summer.

Each shelter now sports a grate on each roof which will channel rain water into an impressive welded copper rain gutter system into the new drainage installed on site.

In the ceilings of each shelter has been installed red oak tongue and groove three quarter inch thick by six-inch wide boards. Clapboard has been applied to the exterior of the storage buildings inside each passenger shelter.

Last summer a six-foot wide sidewalk was completed on the west side of the now twin set of tracks, running from Main Street to beyond the Washington St. play area and the large parking area used by Bette & Cring as a staging area during construction. From there the pedestrian way becomes a trail to connect to the new rail/trail terminus at the end of McCarthy Street and the large state-created 179-vehicle parking lot off Washington Street there.

The plan originally called for a trail from the terminus that would have brought hikers and bikers out on Hebert Lane, but DOT designers agreed to the new sidewalk, that runs through the larger shelter and to the trail beyond after pressure from village and town officials and community leaders about dangers of bringing visitors to and from the trail, via the dangerous S curve beyond Hebert Lane on LeBoeuf Street.

There are green colored metal trusses supporting the roofs of each shelter.

The work at the station could be finished by the end of June, a Bette & Cring official said in recent weeks. The official deadline set by the state DOT on this project, however, is the end of July.

Town officials were told by Adirondack Railroad Preservation Association officials in recent weeks the first train to Tupper Lake for the summer and fall season is expected in mid-July.