WALKING THE LINE: Day 4

We started Day 4 of the Rocky's West Corridor walk at Wadsworth Boulevard, but could only look skyward to see where the new train from Denver to Golden eventually will run.

Here, a 400-foot bridge will arch across one of Lakewood's busiest streets. The Wadsworth station truly will be up in the air, where trains will stop directly over the road to pick up passengers.

The bridge touches down west of Wadsworth in an area called Eiberhood, named after Eiber Elementary School. We had walked two blocks along the track bed on the north side of West 13th Avenue when we saw a man loading up the back of his car across the street.

Stefan Cowan was the first of many people we would encounter this day, all happy to talk with us when we explained our exploration of the future FasTracks route.

Cowan told us he had moved to Lakewood just over two years ago from a cabin in Gilpin County.

His house was built in 1946 and sits sideways on two-thirds of an acre. Out back, Dry Gulch carves a winding path through the wooded, path-laced property. Cowan's 13-year-old son, Malachi, rides his dirt bike back there.

"This is like living in the mountains in the city," Malachi said.

Cowan says he is excited about light rail coming through, right across the street, although he has some concerns about dust, noise and potential flooding during construction.

Gardens and horses

We resumed walking west, preferring to trudge along the old track bed rather than stick to the street. Water was running swiftly in the narrow gulch between the old tracks and the homes and apartments on the north side.

The farther west we went, the more we came across small irrigation ditches running in front of or through yards. Many of them stem from a branch of the historic agricultural ditch called the Wight Lateral.

Farther up 13th Avenue, the street was getting narrower and the trees closing in tighter. Near the corner with Carr, there was a small house with a big dog and a guy tending a healthy-looking garden.

"I don't want to see it, but I don't know if I can stop it," Mike Strack said when we asked him about the light rail that'll go in front of his house. RTD is putting in a 6-foot-high noise wall along the tracks past his house, which is on the south side of 13th Avenue.

Since he was working in the garden when we interrupted him, Strack made an offer: "Want some tomatoes?"

He gave us a few fresh-picked. They were delicious when we cut them up later for salad.

Across Carr, Jean Scriven was watering the many varieties of flowers and shrubs that fill her finely landscaped front and side yards.

"I don't like it going through neighborhoods, but it's done and there's nothing we can do about it," Scriven said, a resignation in her voice that we heard frequently.

West of Carr, 13th Avenue gets even narrower. Unlike folks we met in Two Creeks who want no walls or fences, Scriven wishes the 6-foot noise wall RTD will build would be higher.

"Why didn't they put it on Colfax or Sixth Avenue or Alameda?" she asked of the light rail.

Across 13th from Scriven's house is Richey Park, and just beyond that we entered a property that included five houses arranged around a parking area.

Knocking on the door of the first house, we were greeted by Ryntha Johnson, who'd been at a meeting this summer where RTD's neighborhood liaison, Brenda Tierney, showed noise wall locations to residents.

Johnson still disagrees with RTD's assessment that she doesn't need a noise wall.

"This is our little sanctuary here," she said, seated on a shady patio that faces 13th. "We eat our breakfast and lunch out here." RTD told her it's 70 feet from here to the tracks and the noise impact isn't enough for a wall. It seemed closer to 35 feet when we stepped it off.

Johnson's husband, Norman Hughes, has lived here since he was born in 1953. His grandfather bought the property.

"It's been a family project," he said. With his curly hair and mustache, and the dusty work clothes, Hughes has that "what the heck am I doing here in the 21st century?" look about him. He would not be disappointed if he had been born in the 1800s.

"I live in the past," he readily confessed. He makes classic stringed instruments — lyres, harps, Appalachian-style mountain dulcimers. He shoots off Civil War-era cannons for fun and show as a re-enactor with the 4th U.S. Artillery, Battery B. His group provides the cannon volleys for the Denver Municipal Band's annual performances of the 1812 Overture.

The couple keeps two horses on their large tract. They walked us across a makeshift footbridge over Dry Gulch, which meanders through the property, to where the horses are boarded. Johnson brought out one of them, Babe, to meet us. She enjoys riding Babe along the old track bed, much as others in Eiberhood and Two Creeks use it for jogging or biking.

Hughes' take on light rail is that it will, unfortunately in his view, help Lakewood be a more modern city.

"This used to be where you moved if you wanted to raise horses or let the kids have some chickens," he said.

Every problem imaginable

We were seeing fewer signs of city and more of country as we left the couple and headed west again. Thirteenth was narrowing, and, up ahead, it came to an end at Garrison Street.

Here we found one of the most problematic locations on the corridor. This little crossroads has it all, it seemed. Conflict of neighbor against neighbor, property encroachments, noise issues, traffic concerns.

There is a neighborhood station planned here, on the east side of Garrison. That means crossing gates, bells and possible horn blowing by the train.

The future tracks will continue straight across Garrison in one of the tightest fits on the corridor — made tighter by the wall of a duplex rental on the north side that RTD says is on its land.

Owner Bob Smith said he didn't know when he bought it nine years ago. He'd like RTD to buy him out, but the agency doesn't need his land. Smith says he'll hire a lawyer to fight RTD.

On the other side is Gail Ryan and her family. She moved here 31 years ago. Her bedroom window is on the north side, facing the tracks. With RTD planning to start trains at 5 a.m. and end them at 2 a.m., she and her husband will have light rail punctuating their predawn hours.

To those who say tough, they bought a house on a rail line, Ryan says the days of the old Associated Railroads' trains weren't like what RTD's are going to be.

"It was a spur line where, three days a week, a little train went slowly by during the day with a few boxcars," she said. "The kids thought it was kind of neat and the dogs went crazy, but it was during work hours.

"My son, who's 39, was 12 when we went to our first meeting at the Eiber School about putting transit here," Ryan said. "And we were unanimous that we didn't want light rail."

Ryan echoed Scriven from down on Carr Street, saying light rail should have gone on Colfax, Sixth or Alameda avenues.

She and a few neighbors are trying to find a way to raise their noise walls from 6 to 10 feet. This has rankled some of the others who want no walls.

One lives three doors from Ryan. Paul Ditson is head of the Eiberhood group. He has lived on Garrison since his parents bought the house in 1964. He chuckles about having jumped the slow-moving freight trains as a kid. Now, his focus is on noise and traffic. Ditson and other community activists are concerned the masonry noise walls will make things worse, not better.

"And if the neighbors get their 10-foot wall, that's going to reflect the noise right back into my bedroom," he said.

"We want to keep the unique character of this neighborhood. We've learned to live with traffic and speeding on Garrison, but we want to find a way to do without the bells and alternatives to the noise walls."

In addition, the street closures and the crossing gates have these folks concerned about access and traffic backups.

From Sheridan to Oak Street, there are 19 places to cross the old tracks with a vehicle — say,a firetruck or ambulance.

Light rail will close seven of them – Marshall, Otis, Vance, Allison, Brentwood, Holland and Nelson. That leaves 12 streets open. Three will have bridges to separate trains from cars — Sheridan, Wadsworth and Kipling.

That means nine streets, including Garrison, Carr and Pierce, will have crossing gates coming down, on average, every 21/2 minutes for six hours a day, and every 71/2 minutes the rest of the time.

Worried about school kids

Leaving Ditson's house, we headed along the track bed toward the small crossing at Holland Street, which will be closed.

A new 10-house subdivision sits on the north side of the tracks in what had been one of the many orchards out here in Lakewood. We walked around to the first house and saw two women watching us with curiosity. One of the original apple trees now decorated their front yard.

They were relieved when we told them we were from the Rocky, having speculated that we were with RTD. They gave us bottled water and invited us to their backyard deck.

Norma Reivitt lives here with her sister. Both are recently widowed. They grew up in a large family on a three-acre farm in Pleasant View, on the hill just before Golden. Norma rode the old trolley to class at Golden High School, where she graduated in June 1950, the month that Denver Tramway shut down the city's trolley lines for good.

"It was great; we all rode it. We didn't have to pay because we were in school."

Now that she owns a house right on the line, though, she doesn't like it. Her deck is about 30 feet from where the tracks will go. "But I'm resigned to it. I have no say-so about it."

Up the block at Eiber School, Principal Bing Peng supervised dismissal of the pupils while he spoke with us. He is worried about the safety of the kids who walk across the tracks to get here, as well as traffic. Some folks thought the tracks would go over or under Independence Street. RTD examined the idea years ago at the neighborhood's request, but it was never part of the plan.

Instead, RTD has committed to pay for crossing guards.

"I love my school; I love my neighborhood," Peng said, "but this could be a problem."

West of Independence, RTD is going to build an overpass to carry trains over Kipling Street. It will have a pedestrian underpass at Pikeview Street that some school kids might use, although it's out of the way.

Nearing Kipling, we approached a house and heard a great "heehaw" from the large side yard to the left. It was a donkey. Frolicking around it were four goats. And scampering around all those hooves were eight chickens.

We had reached the Double V Farm, home of Rich and Delayne Vigil and their two young children. Vigil had moved here as a kid and had animals. He bought the house from his parents and kept the animals so his children could grow up with them, too.

The freight trains used to run in a gully behind his house. But with the Kipling overpass, light rail will be high up in the air — higher than his back fence.

"Any expectation of privacy in my back yard is gone," he said.

As we prepared to leave, Vigil rounded up a dozen eggs and offered them to us. Tomatoes and now eggs? If we walked much farther, we could fill a refrigerator on the generosity of the people we were meeting.

We heard plenty of old stories from people during our walk. Now we were at the site of one of them.

Tracks so close to yards

Rail fans who study the history of the old trolley line told us that the two older houses on the southeast corner of Kipling and the tracks were — how shall we say? — places where railroad workers and discreet gentlemen trolley riders from Denver could stop for a while and spend time with friendly women.

Don't know if that's true, but we do know that RTD made no plans for a light-rail stop at Kipling.

Just west of Kipling, 13th Avenue runs high along the south side of the tracks. Around Miller Street, it turns slightly south, creating a thin wedge of land between the street and the tracks.

On the point is a small house purchased four years ago by Kyle and Sophia Painter, a young couple from Nebraska.

Kyle Painter knew about the plans for light rail when he bought. What he didn't know was that the rear corner of his attached shed sticks about 2 feet onto RTD's property. Not until he got a letter in July from RTD saying he had to tear it down.

Worse, Xcel crews started digging to relocate utilities for the project and needed an easement on his land.

They offered him a dollar.

"I'm a blue-collar guy," Painter said. "When it comes to going up against RTD and Xcel, I can't afford for those people to come after me."

I checked in with Painter later. He said Xcel paid him $300 for the easement and RTD told him to hold off on the shed for now. It will try to design the tracks so they don't need that 2 feet.

The train will thread its way west between the backyards here as tightly as at Garrison. We emerged at Nelson Street, where we met Phil Sanchez, a retired English teacher from Lakewood High School.

He took us out on a second-floor deck that faces the future tracks just feet away. We half jokingly suggested he could hand coffee mugs to passing light-rail riders from here.

Sanchez has an inviting patio and garden retreat sandwiched in the corner of his yard right next to the fence where trains will pass. Noise is his biggest concern. Again we hear the refrain from him:

"I don't understand why RTD wants to do it here when they could have put it on Sixth Avenue."

Sanchez's neighbor across Nelson is Odell Orr. Most everyone along the corridor knows "Odie" Orr. RTD's FasTracks staff knows him so well that they tried to get a restraining order against him.

Orr's a hothead, he admitted. And after years of RTD saying it was going to close the Nelson Street crossing, he caught wind of a request from Two Creeks and Eiberhood residents to keep it open for pedestrians.

Orr and others who live around Nelson don't understand why people who don't live here even have anything to say about it.

"You're going to be putting a frog in a blender there," Orr said, imagining people getting caught in the crossing by a passing train.

He was irate and called West Corridor manager Dennis Cole and FasTracks manager Liz Rao to let them know. Vociferously. Vehemently. And at high volume.

He threatened their jobs. He threatened legal action. He threatened to "square off" with them.

RTD took it as a physical threat. But at the court hearing, a judge tossed out RTD's request, saying Orr was threatening lawsuits, not fisticuffs.

"We were not seeking to stop all communication," RTD spokesman Scott Reed said.

"We just wanted to tone down the level of threats he had been making."

"I threw the heat on, but it was all legal," Orr said.

The pedestrian crossing is still unsettled. RTD has to consider it if the community raises it.

We walked past Orr's side yard, came out at Oak Street and stopped.

The vista to the mountains opened up broadly.

This had been a long and draining day.

We were welcomed into so many backyards and living rooms, more than possibly could fit into this account. Each person had some apprehension over what is coming in the next 12 months.

Just 800 feet ahead, we can see where we'll be departing from the old trolley path and following a new course that RTD has laid out for this project, into areas that are ready to absorb a lot more change than the neighborhoods that are now to our backs.

About the series

FasTracks kicks off in earnest next year when crews start building the 12-mile light-rail West Corridor line through diverse and history-rich neighborhoods from downtown to Golden.

All eyes are on this first line, as it will set the tone for the nine other corridors to be built in the massive $6 billion transit system approved by voters in 2004.

To begin telling this story, the Rocky's team of reporter Kevin Flynn, above center, photographer Darin McGregor and videographer Laressa Bachelor trekked the length of the West Corridor. We invite you to come along, and experience our amazing urban journey of discovery.

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