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BOARDMAN -- Part of Western Reserve Road will close again temporarily next month.
Mahoning County Engineer Patrick Ginnetti told Mahoning County Commissioners on Thursday that the road will close for two weeks beginning Sept. 14 so Youngstown & Southeastern Railroad Co. can make safety adjustments to the crossing at Southern Boulevard.
"They're going to move the gate back," Ginnetti told The Vindicator. "We added a third lane and then at Southern we put in a dedicated drop-right turning lane as well. They'll add a much longer arm so when a train goes through, it'll span safely across the road. Then they can do the surface course over top of the middle layer of asphalt that's there now and then add the permanent striping."
Ginnetti said that once that work is completed, the county can hang the new traffic signals, for which posts have already been installed at the intersection.
Ginnetti said in April that Mahoning County paid $1,170,136 to Y&S's owner Midwest and Bluegrass Rail IB LLC, to relocate the railroad signal arm and replace it with a longer arm, along with the signal and lights. The Ohio Rail Development Commission is reimbursing the county $600,000 for the railroad-equipment portion; the county is responsible for the road work.
After more than three years, Ginnetti said the Western Reserve widening project is "substantially complete," meaning the bulk of the heavy road work is done. Once the railroad completes its small project at Southern Boulevard, he said, the county will likely have small jobs to finish on either side of the road, like seeding and raking out some lawns.
The roughly $20 million widening project, which began in 2023, stretches from Hitchcock Road to South Avenue. Marucci and Gaffney Excavating of Youngstown is the contractor. The project originally was expected to be completed in May, but utility-related delays pushed the completion date to September. In March, county commissioners authorized Ginnetti to pursue litigation to recover costs associated with those delays.
In addition to the railroad adjustments, the county will add a traffic signal allowing southbound Southern Boulevard motorists to turn left onto Western Reserve Road, an intersection Ginnetti previously identified as a safety concern because motorists must cross or turn onto Western Reserve from stop signs while traffic on Western Reserve has the right of way.
Y&S is a short-line railroad that connects to both a Norfolk Southern line in Youngstown and a CSX line in Lowellville. The line has changed hands multiple times over the past decade, a trend which has caused headaches for the county.
A county sewer line project was delayed by more than five years because the sewer line had to pass under the railroad tracks at Southern Boulevard, but Ginnetti said every time the county got close to reaching an agreement to bore beneath the tracks, ownership changed and negotiations had to start over.
The trend may continue, in a sense. Public records show that Midwest and Bluegrass minority stakeholder Avory B. Beggs filed a notice in July, seeking to gain indirect controlling interest in Y&S and the TransKentucky Transportation Railroad.