T-R Photo By TREVOR BABCOCK A sign outside Marshalltown letting drivers know Iowa Highway 330 will be closed Monday, May 17.

Iowa Highway 330 eastbound and westbound will be closed for at least 10 days due to road maintenance activities.

District One Planner for Iowa Department of Transportation Andy Loonan said where Iowa Highway 330 turns north toward Albion, the railroad tracks north of Linn Creek will be redone.

“I’ve always known that they’ve not been great,” Loonan said. “We’ll upgrade the railroad crossing, removing the old one and putting in a new one. It’s just kind of a standard process that we do out there and it just happens to be this one’s time.”

Maintenance will begin at 7 a.m., Monday and is planned to last until 4 p.m., May, 26, weather permitting.

Traffic should be able to go up until the hard closure near the railroad tracks between county roads E41 and S75 Loonan said. Travelers attempting to go through will have to take the detour on U.S Highway 30 and Iowa Highway 14.

Because the project includes working on the full railroad crossing, workers are unable to close half of the highway at a time to keep traffic open.

“Sometimes you can phase work, but this isn’t that kind of work,” Loonan said. “We’re doing a full depth section of it, they work on the whole crossing. If we were to do a road project or a bridge project we might be able to do half at a time, leave half of the highway open and alternate traffic. This doesn’t work quite like that. We need to have the whole closure at one time.”

He said he apologizes for any inconveniences the closure and detours may cause, but said the closures are necessary to keep workers safe.

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Contact Trevor Babcock 641-753-6611 or tbabcock@timesrepublican.com.