The City of Kamloops has begun erecting a fence between the rear of businesses along Victoria Street West and the Canadian Pacific Railway line downtown.

The project began on Tuesday (Sept. 6) and is expected to take weeks to complete the construction of the 350-metre long fence, which will include a retaining wall component. The wall will span from Overlanders Bridge, east to the Sun Life Financial building in the 200-block of Victoria Street West.

All westbound drivers along Victoria Street West intending to go under the bridge and up the Summit Connector to Sahali will be detoured over the bridge to the North Shore, where they will travel down Tranquille Road, Leigh Road and Fortune Drive before doubling back across the bridge.

The detour is in effect from Mondays to Fridays between 9 a.m. and 3:30 p.m.

Detours from the construction site will be removed in the evenings and on weekends, but motorists should expect delays and use alternate routes if possible, according to the city. Motorists must obey all traffic control personnel and signage when driving through the construction zone.

Businesses within the construction zone are open and accessible for eastbound traffic. 

The wall being built at the western end of Victoria Street West is being undertaken by the city as a requirement of a land transaction it made with CP that gave the city a piece of rail right-of-way it landscaped as part of the $13-million Victoria Street West Road rehabilitation project in 2019.

The decorative safety fencing is expected to be about seven feet tall and made of metal. The construction is pegged for completion by mid-October and is being carried out by Urban Appeal Landscaping. 

The project has been on the municipality’s radar for a few years.

In 2019, city CAO David Trawin told KTW the railway had safety concerns regarding people crossing the tracks and cutting a chain link fence to access the South Thompson River, so the city proposed mitigating those concerns with better fencing in exchange for the land. CP Rail valued the land at about $200,000.

Trawin told KTW last summer the wall would be constructed in two halves — from the bridge to Sun Life and from Sun Life to First Avenue — with the total project costing about $700,000.

Half of that cost was expected to be covered by a Transport Canada grant, but that was denied last year. Trawin, at the time, told KTW the city had funds for one of those halves and the project would potentially be added to the budget.