Bus barn project nears completion

Tuesday, December 19, 2017
Banner Graphic/Jared Jernagan Still bustling with electricians, painters and other contractors, the new Greencastle Community Schools transportation center project is in the homestretch.

Under construction since summer and in the planning stages for much longer still, the Greencastle Community Schools transportation facility project is motoring toward the finish.

With Superintendent Jeff Hubble and Transportation and Maintenance Director Dan Green wanting to start their final punchlist for the project on Wednesday, there is hope that all of Greencastle’s transportation department will be under roof very soon.

The new facility was a topic of discussion during the Monday meeting of the Greencastle School Board, with Hubble sharing his optimistic outlook on the project.

Walking around the site on Tuesday, the subject Hubble kept mentioning was space.

It all starts with the behemoth bus barn at the back of the site at the corner of Veterans Highway and Tennessee Street. At 330 feet long and 90 feet wide, the building features 36 overhead doors ­— 18 on each side.

“When they put the footprint out there for the barn, I thought, ‘It can’t be that big,’” Hubble recalled.

“I call it the football field indoors,” Green said.

For safety reasons, this “field” is broken into six sections with a firewall between each set of three doors.

With doors on each side, the backing of buses will be virtually eliminated, instead simply pulled in one side and out the other.

The building is large enough that buses can be parked two deep at each matching set of doors, with even more room for the small buses, vans, trucks and snowplows the department houses.

“Everything we have will be under roof with a little elbow room,” Hubble said.

And that’s just the parking building, which will be unheated — but with electricity for lighting and plugging in the diesels in the winter.

The main building is much smaller than the barn but still a step up from the 93-year-old collection of barns and quonset huts on North Vine Street.

One enters to the reception area, with the mechanic’s office to the right and the office of Transportation Coordinator Kyle Clearwaters to the left.

Also in the office area is a driver’s room with plenty of room for meetings and training.

“Right now when we put them all in the board room, they’re pretty crowded,” Hubble said.

In the rear of the main building will be a four-bay shop featuring a portable bus lift and one bay set aside as a bus wash.

The lift will be the big step up.

“So you don’t have to go down in the pit with water in it that they have now,” Hubble said.

At one point, the hope had been to have the new facility done by Christmas, but that may not quite be the case.

Still, Clearwaters and his crew plan to continue to provide the best and safest service they can for the children of the corporation, a subject that came up more than once on Monday when board members and community members had praise for the transportation department.

Clearwaters agreed, crediting his drivers.

“I’d like to think that the crw we have driving has been going up over the years,” Clearwaters said.

Soon they’ll be rewarded with facilities that community member Wayne Lewis compared to a palace following a recent tour.

“Compared to what they had, it’s almost like the Taj Mahal over there,” Lewis said.

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