After years of planning and plenty of griping from drivers, Raleigh’s long-awaited Blue Ridge Road underpass is finally hitting a stage residents can really see. Crews are busy carving out the future roadway beneath a trio of new bridges, while rail workers get ready to set a permanent track alignment overhead. The focus is shifting from towering bridge construction to digging out the trench and building the concrete walls that will eventually let traffic slip under Hillsborough Street and the busy rail corridor.
Where the work stands now
The underpass hinges on three side-by-side bridges that now carry Hillsborough Street, Beryl Road and the railroad tracks, and contractors have already removed about 100,000 cubic yards of dirt. When it is finished, the new Blue Ridge Road will run as much as 30 feet below those bridges, according to The News & Observer. NCDOT is excavating in stages, installing permanent concrete retaining walls as they go. As NCDOT engineer Cody Winkler put it, “We’ve got retaining walls that are going to run basically the entire length of Blue Ridge Road underneath all three bridges.”
Why the schedule slipped
The biggest headache has turned out to be the rail corridor itself. Crews discovered that the soil under the temporary tracks was not dense enough to support trains over the long haul, so they had to dig out the rail bed and replace it with granular stone. That extra work, combined with relocating utilities and bouts of bad weather, helped drag the schedule out. WRAL reported that those fixes, plus the need to keep the line open for roughly two dozen Amtrak and freight trains a day, pushed completion targets back by a year or more as crews rebuilt foundations and shifted buried lines.
To keep trains rolling while the heavy work continues, NCDOT built a parallel set of temporary tracks. The agency expects permanent tracks for CSX and Norfolk Southern to be installed, with trains moving to the new alignment by September 2026, after which crews can pull up the temporary rails and finish digging the underpass, according to The News & Observer. Once the project is wrapped, drivers will use a connector road already built in the northeast corner of the intersection near NC State’s College of Veterinary Medicine, and new traffic signals will sort out how cars move between Hillsborough and Blue Ridge. NCDOT currently expects the underpass to be open in time for the 2027 State Fair…