A North Raleigh road has closed for a year-long transformation
AI-generated summary reviewed by our newsroom.
- St. Albans Drive closed for a year for New Hope Church Road bridge construction
- NCDOT building $22.7M bridge over railroad tracks near Atlantic Avenue
- New Hope Church bridge one of four of its kind planned in Raleigh and Wake Forest
A road in North Raleigh will be closed for the next year, and when it reopens, part of it will be considerably higher than it is now.
St. Albans Drive will be elevated to meet New Hope Church Road where it crosses a set of railroad tracks near Atlantic Avenue.
Contractors for the N.C. Department of Transportation have begun building a bridge to lift New Hope Church up and over the rail line. That entails also raising St. Albans, which will remain closed at New Hope Church while tons of stone and earth are brought to the site.
In addition to closing the north end of St. Albans Drive, contractors have also narrowed New Hope Church Road from four lanes to two where it crosses the tracks. New Hope Church will remain two lanes until the new bridge over the tracks is finished in the spring of 2029.
The bridge is part of a much larger effort to build a modern passenger rail line between Raleigh and Richmond, Virginia. The federal government has pledged $1.1 billion to help NCDOT build the first leg between downtown Raleigh and Wake Forest, which would allow Amtrak to extend its Piedmont trains to northern Wake County.
As part of this first phase, NCDOT plans to eliminate four railroad crossings with new bridges or underpasses, both for safety and so the growing number of trains don’t bring traffic to a halt.
About 11,000 cars and trucks cross the tracks on New Hope Church each day, according to Jason Orthner, director of NCDOT’s Rail Division. The handful of short, slow-moving freight trains that use the line now pose limited problems, Orthner says, but drivers will be happy for the bridge when Amtrak trains and faster-moving freight trains are passing under New Hope Church in the future.
The $22.7 million New Hope Church Road bridge will be five lanes wide, including a center turn lane, and will have sidewalks and bicycle lanes on either side.
It is the second bridge under construction along the rail line; NCDOT began building one to carry Durant Road over the tracks in the summer of 2024. It plans to begin two other grade separations at Millbrook Road in Raleigh and Rogers Road in Wake Forest in the next year or two, Orthner said.
