BNSF Emporia Expansion Project

Burlington Northern Santa Fe Railway (BNSF) Company's 2,200-mile Southern Transcon corridor is a rail corridor that connects Chicago to Southern California. The corridor is one of the most heavily utilized routes for freight transfer across the US. This $160 million project was segmented into three separate packages and encompassed design, preconstruction services, and construction of approximately 60 miles of new second mainline track. In addition to the 60 miles of new main, the project included 19 bridges, three pier protection crash walls, 84 culverts, and 50 at-grade crossings, all completed on time and under budget.

The project team’s environmental governance included the avoidance of wetlands and on-site processing of crushed materials to reduce materials purchasing that would require long-distance hauling, thus reducing the waste of energy resources off-site and the pollution of transportation. BNSF and the engineering firms utilized stormwater personnel and had a robust stormwater monitoring/maintenance program.

Selling Points

Social governance included local hiring throughout the project by using radio/newspaper advertisements and job fairs in the local communities. Constant communication was maintained with both local counties where the project occurred with representatives from the project consistently attending shareholder and community township meetings to update local townships on the work occurring in the area. Project work was planned to minimize disruptions to local communities and school bus routes as the project included community roadway upgrades and a local highway bridge upgrade in one of the counties.

On April 29, 2022, a major tornado developed over eastern Wichita before entering the suburbs of Andover, Kansas, and damaged or destroyed homes and businesses with debris and downed power lines blocking roads and major intersections. Project staff donated their time, trucks, and equipment to help the Andover community in their efforts to clean up. As a thank you from the City of Andover, the Andover City Public Information Officer sent a letter of appreciation and complimentary concert tickets for interested staff.

Major Achievements

At the onset of this project, SEMA established a risk matrix for the entire project, identifying over 50 initial risks. This provided a solid foundation upon which risk matrices for each of the three construction packages were built. Through a series of several risk workshops, a hybrid structure was determined as the ‘best fit’ for the project. Essentially, the project team's CM/GC approach allowed the unit price risk to be fully negotiated and validated by PCS within the OPCC process, and when triggered in the field they are paid by actual units installed. Lastly, there were BNSF-owned risk items, which if triggered were measured/paid under Force Account and Work Change Directives (WCD). These items were contained within the final risk matrices for CP-1, CP-2, and CP-3, respectively, and provided reasonable values for BNSF budgetary purposes.

SEMA’s experience in CM/GC delivery provided a sturdy framework to rely on when the project encountered scheduling and budgetary challenges due to the COVID-19 Pandemic. The budget became a moving target, which impacted workforce allocations because of budget narrowing and expansion. At different segments of the project, only certain amounts of work were allowed, and SEMA’s staff remained flexible in pace, scale, and budget.

The completion of this project successfully concludes the final double-track segment of the 2,200-mile Southern Transcon Corridor stretching between LA and Chicago, acting as the final spike on a 150-year-old legacy project and beginning a new era for BNSF.

Savings

SEMA’s initial innovations savings for the project penciled out to approximately $7M in overall savings to the project and included haul route analyses to determine costs, train studies to analyze and maximize allotted work hours, and atypical construction methods to perform work in tight areas, like using a self-propelled modular transporter cantilever to deconstruct and replace a bridge within a 20-foot imprint. In addition to the original proposed innovations, the project team successfully identified two major innovations that added over $14M of additional savings to BNSF.