Balancing Shore Protection and Public Access Concerns: Engineering a Solution for an AMTRAK Track Realignment

A plan to re-align the AMTRAK mainline in the Town of East Lyme, Connecticut, threatened to eliminate a public beach and provided an unworkable replacement to an existing elevated boardwalk. At the time, the Town was already engaged in the process of rehabilitating an adjacent 2,900-ft section of the “Niantic Bay Overlook” that directly connected to the elevated boardwalk that the AMTRAK project threatened. Through a cooperative engineering design process, the Town successfully worked with AMTRAK to create a workable solution that upgraded shore protection for the realigned AMTRAK corridor, re-created the public access along the beach, and enhanced existing beach resources. The entire project represents a design that is substantially more resilient to wave and flood damage, as beach width and overlook elevations were revised to reflect more stringent design protocols. The initial phase of the project consisted of AMTRAK’s realignment of the track system, requiring seaward encroachment of the railroad embankment onto the beach. The initial AMTRAK design replaced a wood pile walkway with a sheet pile seawall, armor stone revetment, and beach nourishment along the seaward edge of the railroad embankment. The final phase of the project is presently under construction and consists a 2,900-ft rehabilitation of a failed portion of the existing overlook that previously incorporated a relatively low-lying stone dust walkway fronted by a rip-rap revetment. Due to funding limitations, the revised design required use of as much of the existing overlook materials as practical. The final design consisted of raising the walkway approximately 3 feet by creating a steel sheet pile wall and utilizing the existing undersized rip-rap to stabilize the fronting beach. Where necessary, a full revetment cross-section fronting the sheet pile wall was designed, as well as repairs to the revetment slope between the existing railroad tracks and the reconstructed overlook pathway.