As part of a joint venture, Hanson provided the Ohio Army National Guard with plans and technical specifications for the reconfiguration and rehabilitation of five railroad tracks at the Camp James A. Garfield Joint Military Training Center railyard in Portage County, Ohio.
Four of the rehabilitated tracks were configured for loading tanks and other vehicles with a new four-track concrete end-loading ramp; the fifth track was configured to support container loading and unloading via the military Rough Terrain Container Handler (RTCH) system. The design also called for the removal of the tracks north of the new concrete end ramp and next to the RTCH track and the ballast to be graded to provide staging areas with a ballast-surfaced access road to Smalley Road. The project is projected to quadruple the end-loading capacity of the yard, add RTCH container loading capabilities and decrease the base’s dependence on CSX Transportation to store rail cars offsite.
The project scope included a topographic survey, track inspection, track civil design and structural design of the loading ramp. The team also managed a geotechnical investigation that included soil borings and lab testing to determine classification and unconfined compression strength. The geotechnical recommendations were used for the foundation design of the end ramp and the design of the track structure, which was performed with the Transportation Systems Center’s TRACK computer program.
In the main body of the yard, the project team designed the new tracks to match the alignments of existing tracks as much as possible to reuse the existing rail and reduce construction costs. Because the turnouts couldn’t be salvaged and the area was overgrown with vegetation, the ladder for the new yard used four new turnouts and new 115-pound rail.
The team performed all track design per Unified Facilities Criteria 4-860-01. The four-track loading ramp was designed to support the M1A2 tank, the M2A3 Bradley Fighting Vehicle and the HL-93 truck. Hanson used Pavement-Transportation Computer Assisted Structural Engineering to design the pavement section for the loading ramp. The team also provided the rehabilitation design of the 5,900-foot lead track from the connection with CSX to the yard, inspection of the lead track and reused yard tracks (which included marking of ties for replacement), design of two road crossing replacements and specification of herbicide vegetation control for the lead track and yard.
