OH: Key West Side RTA rail station reopens Friday after 13 months of work

The West 117th Street Rapid station returns to service Friday, 13 months after closing for a major reconstruction project that replaced three aging bridges and gave the busy Red Line platform a significant facelift.

The Greater Cleveland Regional Transit Authority spent $8.6 million on the work, which included rebuilding side-by-side bridges for westbound and eastbound tracks, plus the station platform between.

The spans, which date to the mid-1950s, carry trains over West 117th Street at the Cleveland- Lakewood border.

“This project is going to extend the life of the bridges,” said Michael Schipper, RTA’s deputy general manager of engineering and project management. “It gives us a new platform. We also designed the platform so it will be easy to modify when the new rail cars come in a couple of years.”

The new platform comes with upgraded lighting and speakers. The next generation of RTA rail cars will be narrower than the current fleet, so the design allows for adjustments.

One complication, RTA resident engineer Grant Kersh noted, was coordinating work with Norfolk Southern, which has freight railroad tracks immediately next to the RTA tracks. The railroad installed a steel beam between the Norfolk Southern and RTA bridges to prevent stones from the Norfolk Southern side from falling below.

The entry point to the station at parking lot level was rebuilt in 2008.

Historical significance

It’s a historic station of sorts in the Red Line’s history, which in 1969 became the first commuter rail service in the Western Hemisphere to connect a downtown directly into an airport terminal.

It was 70 years ago in March that the old Cleveland Transit System launched Rapid service from its Windermere station in East Cleveland.

The line was extended from Union Terminal to West 117th Street later in 1955, to West Park in 1958 and to the airport in 1968.

The Red Line carried 3.2 million passengers last year, the busiest route by far in the RTA system and accounting for about 13% of total RTA ridership.

The West 117th station is one of the busiest on the Red Line, with heavy use from bus transfers. During the closure, many of those transfers were shifted to nearby stations.