Starting Friday, part of Blue Line will be shut down for five weeks

Metro Transit will shut down the southern end of the Blue Line for five weeks as crews carry out the largest, longest and most complicated maintenance project in the history of the light-rail line since it opened 18 years ago.

Starting Friday night and continuing until the early morning hours of Aug. 15, trains will not run between Terminal 2 at the Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport and the Mall of America as the agency replaces sections of track that have worn out and upgrades technology that guides safety systems.

"We will use every minute of it," said project manager Ryan Heath, noting that hundreds of workers from around the country will be brought to Minneapolis and be on the job 24 hours a day. "This is important for the next 20 to 30 years for the Blue Line. We are doing a ton of work to refresh the system to provide reliable service in the future."

Buses will fill in for trains during the shutdown to allow passengers to complete their trips. To help make that easier, Metro Transit will publish a schedule on its website to show when replacement buses will run, said Metro Transit spokesman Drew Kerr.

At the same time, Metro Transit will pilot using two-car trains instead of three-car trains from Saturday through Aug. 20 elsewhere on the Blue Line where trains will continue to run, and on the Green Line between the downtowns of Minneapolis and St. Paul.

The test will allow Metro Transit to deploy fewer rail cars, which will decrease the amount of manpower needed to keep them clean and allow police and Community Service officers to cover more ground, Kerr said.

"Riders are more likely to see a police officer," Kerr said.

Safety has been a top issue to address as riders have raised concerns over drug use, erratic behavior, smoking, harassment, public urination, defecation and litter at stations, bus stops and rail platforms.

The Blue Line, which runs from downtown Minneapolis to the Mall of America, opened in 2004. Over a million trains have made the 11-mile trip about every 10 to 12 minutes over the years, and the system is experiencing a lot of wear and tear, Heath said. The agency made some safety upgrades in downtown Minneapolis before the 2018 Super Bowl.

But this effort will be more intense than the downtown project and disruptive for thousands of riders for a long duration.

The project has been in the works for more than a year as the transit agency lined up contractors with RailWorks Corp. and devised a plan to communicate with riders. The agency looked at doing the work over a longer period, such as on weekends only like the Minnesota Department of Transportation does with some road projects. But that would make the $15 million project even more costly as out-of-town workers would be coming and going, Heath said.

"When it's closed two days, then open for five, then closed for two, it could be confusing to riders as to which days trains would be running," he said. "It seemed far more efficient and easier to communicate" by doing one long closure.

Much of the work may not be visible. Upgrading signal systems is "behind the scenes" work and often takes a long time, another reason for the five-week shutdown, Heath said.

Some work will be visible. A new signal system to improve pedestrian crossing and interface better with traffic lights will be installed at 24th Avenue and Killebrew Drive near the Mall of America.

The project comes as about 15,600 riders each weekday use the Blue Line, according to May data from Metro Transit.

"There is never a good time," said project manager Kyle Sheppard. The agency chose the summer to get it done before the Vikings season starts and ahead of the State Fair.

Metro Transit has plans over the next five years to refresh other portions of the Blue Line before looking at the Green Line.

"It's super intense work, but we are looking at decades of reliability," Heath said.