The Fairmount Line Over East Cottage Street & Norfolk Avenue

The East Cottage and Norfolk Avenue bridges, carry the Fairmount Line through Roxbury and Dorchester.  These bridges were built in 1906.  This project replaces both bridges to extend the service life by 75 years, strengthen the support structures, remove speed restrictions, and repaint community mural on East Cottage Street.  Fairmount Line

The original schedule for this Value Engineering Study was to be performed shortly after the 75% Design was complete.

During the Function Analysis in the workshop, it was revealed that in addition to the project’s primary goals of meeting the project schedule and increasing the load capacity of the bridge, other important functions included minimizing the impact to the communities adjacent to the project sites and to minimize the outages incurred during construction. The Value Team recommended over 10% capital cost savings from recommendation in the workshop.

More importantly, the VE Team developed several recommendations which sought to reduce the impact to surrounding communities by reducing the amount of weekend and night work required, reducing the damage to the artwork on the East Cottage Street abutment, and by allowing pedestrian traffic through the project site whenever possible.

To address the number of outages incurred during construction, the VE Team also developed recommendations which accelerated construction and worked with the track’s largest revenue hours to ensure no disruption or impact to service.