Minnesota's Northstar Commuter Rail System, which opened in November 2009, serves the Northstar Corridor between Minneapolis and St. Cloud, and Northstar rolling stock will operate in Burlington Northern Santa Fe Railway (BNSF) right-of-way. This is an important cost-saving measure, but it created interesting design and construction challenges. It meant that new sidings would have to be added so that freight and commuter trains could pass each other, and commuter-specific infrastructure would have to be shoehorned into BNSF's right-of-way. BNSF required round-the-clock monitoring of all construction sites-they wanted to be apprised of any track movement over 19 mm (0.75 in). The monitoring task fell to EVS, Inc., of Eden Prairie, Minnesota.
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